Re: "A huge debt of gratitude" - Michael Stonebraker

On Jul 22, 2015 12:07 PM, "Jolly Chen" <jolly(at)chenfamily(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hey everyone,
>
> You have probably heard that Mike Stonebraker recently won the Turing
award. A recording of his award lecture is available at:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbGeKi6T6QI
>
> It is an entertaining talk overall. If you fast forward to about the 1:07
mark, he makes some comments about postgres.
>
> Here’s my rough transcription:
>
> "The abstract data type system in postgres has been added to a lot of
relational database systems. It's kind of de facto table stakes for
relational databases these days, essentially intact. That idea was really
a good one. It was mentioned in the citation for my Turing award winning.
However, serendipity played a huge role, which is, the biggest impact of
postgres by far came from two Berkeley students that I'll affectionately
call Grumpy and Sleepy. They converted the academic postgres prototype
from QUEL to SQL in 1995. This was in parallel to the commercial activity.
And then a pick-up team of volunteers, none of whom have anything to do
with me or Berkeley, have been shepherding that open source system ever
since 1995. The system that you get off the web for postgres comes from
this pick-up team. It is open source at its best and I want to just
mention that I have nothing to do with that and that collection of folks we
all owe a huge debt of gratitude to, because they have robustize that code
line and made it so it really works.”
>
> Thank you all so much for your hard work over the last twenty years!!
>
> Affectionately,
>
> Grumpy

Thank you! And a big thanks to the stewards of the project.

Sincerely,