Jim Gray (computer scientist)
Jim Gray | |
---|---|
2006 | |
Born | James Nicholas Gray January 12, 1944[1] San Francisco, California[2] |
Disappeared | January 28, 2007 (aged 63) Waters near San Francisco |
Status | Declared dead in absentia January 28, 2012 (aged 68) |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D) |
Occupation | Computer scientist |
Employer | |
Known for | Work on database and transaction processing systems |
Spouse(s) | Loretta (divorced), Donna Carnes (widowed) |
Children | 1 (daughter) |
Awards | Turing Award (1998)[3] IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award (1998) |
James Nicholas Gray (born 1944; disappeared 2007) was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award[4] in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation".
Contents
Early years and personal life[edit]
Gray was born in San Francisco, the second child of Ann Emma Sanbrailo, who was a teacher and James Able Gray, who was in the U.S. Army; the family moved to Rome where Gray spent most of the first three years of his life, learning to speak Italian before English.[2] The family then moved to Virginia, spending about four years there, until Gray's parents divorced, after which he returned to San Francisco with his mother.[2] His father, an amateur inventor, patented a design for a ribbon cartridge for typewriters that earned him a substantial royalty stream.[2]
After being turned down for the Air Force Academy he entered the University of California, Berkeley as a freshman in 1961.[2] To help pay for college he worked as a co-op for General Dynamics, where he learned to use a Monroe calculator. Discouraged by his chemistry grades, he left Berkeley for six months, returning after an experience in industry he later described as "dreadful".[2] Gray earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics (Math and Statistics) in 1966.[5]
After marrying, Gray moved with his wife Loretta to New Jersey, his wife's home state; she got a job as a teacher and he got one at Bell Labs working on a digital simulation that was to be part of Multics. At Bell, he worked three days a week and spent two days as a Master's student at New York University's Courant Institute. After a year they traveled for several months before settling again in Berkeley, where Gray entered graduate school with Michael A. Harrison as his advisor. In 1969 he received his Ph.D. in programming languages, then did two years of post-doctoral work for IBM.[2]
While at Berkeley, Gray and Loretta had a daughter; they were later divorced. His second wife was Donna Carnes.
Research[edit]
Gray pursued his career primarily working as a researcher and software designer at a number of industrial companies, including IBM, Tandem Computers, and DEC. He joined Microsoft in 1995 and was a Technical Fellow for the company[1][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] until he was lost at sea in 2007.[14]
Gray contributed to several major database and transaction processing systems. IBM's System R was the precursor of the SQL relational databases that have become a standard throughout the world. For Microsoft, he worked on TerraServer-USA and Skyserver.
Among his best known achievements are:
- granular database locking[15]
- two-tier transaction commit semantics
- the "five-minute rule" for allocating storage
- the data cube operator for data warehousing applications
- describing the requirements for reliable transaction processing (memorably called the ACID test) and implementing them in software.
He assisted in the development of Virtual Earth.[16][17][18] He was also one of the co-founders of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research.
Disappearance[edit]
Gray, an experienced sailor, owned a forty-foot yacht. On January 28, 2007 he failed to return from a short solo trip to the Farallon Islands near San Francisco to scatter his mother's ashes. The weather was clear, and no distress call was received, nor was any signal detected from the boat's automatic Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon.
A four-day Coast Guard search using planes, helicopters, and boats found nothing.[19][20][21][22] On February 1, 2007, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area[23] and the thousands of images were posted to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Students, colleagues, and friends of Gray, and computer scientists around the world formed a "Jim Gray Group" to study these images for clues. On February 16 this search was suspended,[24] and an underwater search using sophisticated equipment ended May 31.[9][25][26][27][28][29]
The University of California, Berkeley and Gray's family hosted a tribute on May 31, 2008.[30] Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope software is dedicated to Gray. In 2008, Microsoft opened a research center in Madison, Wisconsin, named after Jim Gray.[31] On January 28, 2012 Gray was declared legally dead.[32][33]
Jim Gray eScience Award[edit]
Each year, Microsoft Research presents the Jim Gray eScience Award[34] to a researcher who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of data-intensive computing. Award recipients are selected for their ground-breaking, fundamental contributions to the field of eScience. Previous award winners include Alex Szalay (2007), Carole Goble (2008), Jeff Dozier (2009), Phil Bourne (2010), Mark Abbott (2011), Antony John Williams (2012), and Dr. David Lipman, M.D. (2013).
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ a b "DeWitt Undergraduate CS Scholarship: Dr. James Gray". University of Wisconsin–Madison. Retrieved 2010-01-18.
- ^ a b c d e f g Oral History Interview with Jim Gray ([purl.umn.edu/107339 Synopsis] at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. 3 January 2002. Retrieved 2010-01-19.
- ^ Gray, J. (2003). "What next?: A dozen information-technology research goals" (PDF). Journal of the ACM. 50: 41–57. arXiv:cs/9911005. doi:10.1145/602382.602401. Jim Gray Turing Award lecture
- ^ Gray, Jim (1998). "Jim Gray - A.M. Turing Award Winner". ACM.
- ^ "Biography of Dr. Jim Gray". faircom.com. Archived from the original on 3 July 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
- ^ Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques (with Andreas Reuter) (1993). ISBN 1-55860-190-2.
- ^ The Benchmark Handbook: For Database and Transaction Processing Systems (1991). Morgan Kaufmann. ISBN 978-1-55860-159-8.
- ^ Saade, E. (2008). "Search survey for S/V Tenacious". ACM SIGMOD Record. 37 (2): 70. doi:10.1145/1379387.1379409.
- ^ a b Hellerstein, J. M.; Tennenhouse, D. L. (2011). "Searching for Jim Gray". Communications of the ACM. 54 (7): 77. doi:10.1145/1965724.1965744.
- ^ Crawford, D. (2008). "Jim Gray". Communications of the ACM. 51 (11): 7. doi:10.1145/1400214.1400216.
- ^ Szalay, A. S. (2008). "Jim Gray, astronomer". Communications of the ACM. 51 (11): 58. doi:10.1145/1400214.1400231.
- ^ Gray, J. (2008). "Technical perspectiveThe Polaris Tableau system". Communications of the ACM. 51 (11): 74. doi:10.1145/1400214.1400233.
- ^ Stonebraker, M.; Dewitt, D. J. (2008). "A tribute to Jim Gray". Communications of the ACM. 51 (11): 54. doi:10.1145/1400214.1400230.
- ^ Steve Silberman (24 Jul 2007). "Inside the High Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend". Wired. Retrieved 3 Feb 2015.
- ^ Eswaran, K. P.; Gray, J. N.; Lorie, R. A.; Traiger, I. L. (1976). "The notions of consistency and predicate locks in a database system". Communications of the ACM. 19 (11): 624–633. doi:10.1145/360363.360369.
- ^ Winslett, Marianne. "Interview with Jim Gray for ACM SIGMOD Record, March 2003 as part of Distinguished Database Profiles" (PDF). sigmod.org.
- ^ Interview on MSDN Channel 9, Behind the Code, March 3, 2006
- ^ "Deconstructing databases with Jim Gray". regdeveloper.co.uk.
- ^ "Coast Guard searches for missing SF boater: 63-year-old man failed to return from trip to Farallon Islands". San Francisco Chronicle. January 29, 2007.
- ^ Doyle, Jim (January 30, 2007). "Sea search for missing Microsoft scientist: No sign of S.F. man who set out alone for Farallon Islands in 40-foot sailboat". San Francisco Chronicle.
- ^ Schevitz, Tanya; Rubenstein, Steve (January 31, 2007). "Search for missing sailor extends to Humboldt". San Francisco Chronicle.
- ^ May, Meredith; Doyle, Jim (January 31, 2007). "Vast search off coast for data wizard". San Francisco Chronicle.
- ^ Hafner, Katie (February 3, 2007). "Silicon Valley's High-Tech Hunt for Colleague". New York Times. Retrieved May 6, 2010.
- ^ "Friends of missing computer scientist suspend search for him". San Francisco Chronicle. February 16, 2007. Archived from the original on 2007-03-05.
- ^ Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend, Wired Magazine (August 2007)
- ^ "Amazon Mechanical Turk - All HITs". mturk.com. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
- ^ "Tenacious Search". openphi.net. Archived from the original on 3 July 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
- ^ Help Find Jim Information to help locate Jim Gray
- ^ Print a MISSING Poster Hang a MISSING Poster in Southern California and Mexico.
- ^ root (16 February 2016). "Industry".
- ^ "Database Pioneer Joins Microsoft to Start New Database Research Lab | Stories". Stories. 2008-04-23. Retrieved 2018-07-19.
- ^ Greengard, Samuel (June 2012). Vardi, Moshe, ed. "Jim Gray Declared Dead". Communications of the ACM. 55 (7): 19. doi:10.1145/2209249.2209257. ISSN 0001-0782.
- ^ Wingfield, Nick (May 18, 2012). "Closure in Disappearance of Computer Scientist". The New York Times. Retrieved May 18, 2012.
- ^ "Jim Gray eScience Award - Microsoft Research". microsoft.com. Microsoft. Retrieved 2 July 2015.
External links[edit]
This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. (June 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) |
- Gray's Microsoft Research home page, last accessed 23 June 2013
- James ("Jim") Nicholas Gray, Turing Award citation
- Video Behind the Code on Channel 9, interviewed by Barbara Fox, 2005
- Video The Future of Software and Databases, expert panel discussion with Rick Cattell, Don Chamberlin, Daniela Florescu, Jim Gray and Jim Melton, Software Development 2002 conference
- Oral History Interview with Jim Gray, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 3 January 2002, San Francisco, California.
- The Future of Databases, SQL Down Under. Interview with Dr Greg Low, 2005.
- Tribute by Mark Whitehorn for The Register April 30, 2007
- EE380: The Search for Jim Gray, Panel Discussion at Stanford University (video archive) May 28, 2008
(Proceedings) May 31, 2008
- Tribute by James Hamilton
- Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?, a technical report by Jim Gray, 1985
- 1944 births
- 2000s missing person cases
- 2007 deaths
- American computer scientists
- Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences alumni
- Database researchers
- Digital Equipment Corporation people
- Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
- IBM Research computer scientists
- Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
- Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- Microsoft employees
- Missing person cases in California
- Microsoft technical fellows
- People declared dead in absentia
- People lost at sea
- Scientists from California
- Turing Award laureates
- University of California, Berkeley College of Engineering alumni