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

Nice to hear you again Jolly !

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 1:42 AM, 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
>
>
>
> --
> Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org)
> To make changes to your subscription:
> http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
>