Michael Stonebraker

Stonebraker created Ingres at UC Berkeley starting around 1973 and later co-founded Postgres, which became PostgreSQL when SQL support was added in 1996. He went on to build Vertica (columnar analytics), VoltDB (in-memory OLTP), and several other database systems, co-founding numerous companies over his career.

Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award for foundational contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems. The citation specifically highlighted Ingres and PostgreSQL, which proved that relational databases could be built outside IBM and helped popularize the technology across the industry.

In a 2005 paper and subsequent talks, Stonebraker argued that general-purpose relational databases were suboptimal for specialized workloads, predicting a market split into columnar stores, streaming engines, and in-memory OLTP systems. His thesis was validated as the database market fragmented into dozens of specialized engines over the following decade.

Ingres, developed at Berkeley starting around 1973, pioneered the QUEL query language as an alternative to SQL. Stonebraker began Postgres in 1986 as a 'post-Ingres' system adding object-oriented features, and the project was renamed PostgreSQL in 1996 when a SQL query language layer was added, eventually becoming one of the world's most popular open-source databases.