Alan J. Perlis Lecture Series
October 5, 2006
10:30 a.m., AKW 200

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Speaker: Michael Stonebraker, EECS Dept, M.I.T.
Title: One Size Fits All: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone

Abstract: For the past couple of decades, the major commercial DBMS vendors have been selling “one size fits all”, i.e. a single system appropriate for all data management tasks. In this talk, we discuss two customized engines, one for stream processing and one for read-intensive tasks. In both cases, two orders of magnitude performance advantage are available from a specialized architecture, and we explore the reasons for these dramatic performance differences.

We then speculate that there are several more vertical markets where a similar improvement is possible. If separate engines address all of these markets, then it will herald the end of the monolithic DBMS solutions.

Bio: Michael Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES, and the federated data system, Mariposa. All three prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years. He is the founder of three successful Silicon Valley startups, whose objective was to commercialize these prototypes.

Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on data base technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services. He was awarded the prestigious ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1994, and has been recognized by Computer Reseller News as one of the top five software developers of the century. Moreover, Forbes magazine named him one of the 8 innovators driving the Silicon Valley wealth explosion during their 80th anniversary edition in 1998. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T.