"A huge debt of gratitude" - Michael Stonebraker

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