A High-Tech Toast To Better Wines
Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear
1974: The release of INGRES and the birth of the database industry
[画像:Archives] 2003
2002
2001
Lab Notes, Research from the College of Engineering
Michael Stonebraker, co-inventor of the relational database.
At the
dawn of the digital age in the 1960s, large corporations began
to migrate from paper records to digital files. The problem
was that there was no easy way to find what you were looking
for in the massive amounts of data stored. In the mid-1970s,
UC Berkeley engineers pioneered a system to organize and access
data that, in turn, spawned a 7ドル billion dollar industry now
driven by companies like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.
In 1970, IBM researcher E. F. Codd published a seminal paper
outlining a novel way to organize and access data. Codd's "relational
model of data for large shared data banks" called for information
to be stored in tables that could be searched using a high-level
language. Instead of searching through one record at a time,
the user could specify a single query that would be performed
across all of the data. For example, the new approach would enable
car companies to instantly calculate how many cars of a specific
model were sold in a particular geographic region during a given
month.
IBM set out to develop a prototype system that would demonstrate
Codd's idea. Simultaneously, Michael Stonebraker, a young
professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at
UC Berkeley, was searching for a research project that would
earn him tenure. He found it with relational databases.
Collaborating with professor Eugene Wong, Stonebraker began
developing a relational data system called INGRES (Interactive
Graphics
and Retrieval System). Inspired by Codd's publications,
Wong, Stonebraker and graduate student Jerry Held turned INGRES
into a working system that could satisfy the needs of an urban
systems project, led by Professor Pravin Varaiya.
Unlike IBM's similar System R project, the constantly-evolving
INGRES code was freely available to users outside the University
who wanted to experiment with the system themselves and offer
suggestions. INGRES was an early example of the University's
commitment to what's now called Open Source software distribution.
While still teaching at Berkeley, Stonebraker founded Ingres
Corp. to commercialize the relational database technology.
(The company was acquired in 1990 by ASK Computer Systems.)
Shortly
after launching Ingres Corp., Stonebraker and his students
pushed databases ahead yet again with POSTGRES, a relational
database
that could understand "objects," groups of simpler
pieces of data. POSTGRES, now known as PostgreSQL, is considered
the most advanced open-source database available today. While
at Berkeley, Stonebraker also developed Mariposa, the federated
data system.
In August 1992, Stonebraker founded Illustra Information
Technologies to commercialize POSTGRES and four years later
joined database
giant Informix Corporation as its CTO after the company acquired
Illustra. He retired from UC Berkeley in 2000 and is currently
an adjunct professor of computer science at MIT.
Held spent 18 years as an executive at Tandem Computers before
managing the world's largest enterprise software business
as a Senior Vice President at Oracle. He's now CEO
of the Held Group, a venture capital firm.
Wong, a UC
Berkeley professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer
sciences, served as head of the National Science
Foundation's engineering directorate and Chairman of
the Government of Hong Kong's Council of Advisers
on Innovation and Technology. Last fall, he became CEO
of Versata
Inc., an
Oakland-based business software and services company.
Evident in systems from Microsoft's SQL Server to FileMaker,
the work of these Berkeley researchers provided us with
the tools to harness the power of digital data in all its myriad
forms.
Related Sites
"The
Rise of Relational Databases"
Michael
Stonebraker's old UC Berkeley home page
Lab Notes is published online by the Public Affairs Office of the UC Berkeley College of Engineering. The Lab Notes mission is to illuminate groundbreaking research underway today at the College of Engineering that will dramatically change our lives tomorrow.
Media contact: Teresa
Moore, Lab Notes editor, Director of Public Affairs
Writer, Researcher: David
Pescovitz
Web Manager: Michele
Foley
Subscribe or send comments to the Engineering Public Affairs Office: lab-notes@coe.berkeley.edu.
© 2003 UC Regents. Updated 9/29/03.
