Dr. James Gray
Jim Gray (James Nicholas Gray) was born January 12, 1944, and was lost at sea
off the northern California coast while sailing on January 28, 2007. Jim was one
of the world's most distinguished computer scientists. His numerous contributions
to the field of database systems were recognized with memberships in
the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering,
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the European Academy of Science.
He was also a Fellow of both the ACM and IEEE. In 1999 Jim was awarded the
ACM A.M. Turing Award for his seminal contributions to our understanding of
the concept of transactions and their implementation.
Jim's pioneering research on transactions at IBM in the 1970s provides the
foundation for today's world of electronic commerce. Every time someone uses
an ATM, reserves a seat on an airplane, or purchases an item on the web,
they are relying on the mechanisms that Jim first developed. These techniques
insure that the 'right' thing always happens - even in the presence of software
and hardware failures. While they seem second nature to us today,
when Jim conceived of them they required very deep insight into the
complexities of concurrently executing queries against a shared database system.
Jim received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California,
Berkeley in 1966 and 1969. Soon after receiving his Ph.D. he joined the
IBM San Jose Research Laboratory where he helped lead the design and development
of System R, one of the first database systems to use the relational data model.
In 1988, System R (along with the INGRES project at Berkeley) was honored
with the ACM Software Systems Award, for pioneering the development of relational
database systems. It was as part of the System R project that Jim first developed
the notion of what it meant for transactions to be serializable,
the connection between serializability and database consistency,
and how a simple protocol known as 'two phase' locking could be used to ensure
that two or more transactions are serializable with respect to each other
without having to understand the semantics of the transactions.
Between leaving IBM in 1980 and joining Microsoft in 1995,
Jim worked for Tandem on the parallel relational database system Non-Stop SQL
from 1980 to 1990 and at Digital Equipment Corporation from 1990 to 1995. Over
the course of his career Jim made numerous technical contributions beyond his work
on transactions including database system architectures and algorithms,
fault tolerance, input/output architectures, parallel database systems,
database system performance evaluation and benchmarking,
multidimensional data analysis, and eScience including the TerraServer
and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey projects. When he disappeared in 2007,
he held the title of Technical Fellow at Microsoft.
Jim made substantial service contributions to the nation and the
computer science community as a member of numerous technical advisory boards
and committees. He was a member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications
Board from 1990 to 1999, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Next Generation
Internet, High Performance Computing, and Information Technology (PITAC)
from 1997 to 2001, the NSF CISE Advisory Committee from 2002 to 2004,
and a Trustee of the VLDB Endowment from 1994 to 1999. Over the course
of his career he also mentored dozens of junior colleagues in both industry
and academia, greatly influencing their careers.
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