Leadership and Advocacy

More than anyone else, Mike Stonebraker has set the research agenda for database system implementation architecture for the past 40 years: relational databases, distributed databases, object-relational databases, massively distributed federated databases, and specialized databases.  In each of these cases, his was the ground-breaking research effort, arguing for a different system-level architecture type of database system. He proposed the architecture system type, justified its importance, evangelized the research agenda to create a new topic within the database community, and built a successful prototype that he later moved into the commercial world as a product, Ingres and Postgres being the most well-known and influential examples. It is for these efforts that he richly deserves the ACM Turing Award