Tales from the Doghouse - Remembering Jim Gray and a Tribute

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Time flies. It's been a year since Dr. Gray, a Microsoft research fellow and Turing Award-winner, went missing while sailing off San Francisco. A year ago, at Boise Code Camp 2.0, I hosted a session on finding Jim Gray, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Now, a year after Dr. Gray went missing, the Association of Computing Machinery (the organization that holds the Turing Awards), the IEEE Computer Society and the University of California-Berkeley have joined to announce a tribute to Gray, planned for May 31 at the UC Berkeley campus. Jim Gray attended UC Berkeley from 1961 to 1969 and earned the school's very first Ph.D. in computer science. Fittingly enough, the tribute will also feature technical sessions for registered participants.

You can find more information about the tribute here:

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 8:01:58 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Comments [1] -
Community | Microsoft | SQLblog

Thursday, February 14, 2008 7:38:35 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Microsoft is also paying tribute to Jim Gray. The theme of 'hero' in
the upcoming sql server product launch event:
http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/register/default.mspx
was inspired by him. He is a hero to MS because a hero has the courage to embrace a new set of ideas and leave behind a long established but dead end old ones. A hero has the conviction and self-confidence that allows one to make such a big and important decision. His signature MS paper:
'A Call to Arms' ,April 2005
http://www.acmqueue.org/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=293
is a call to others to join him in a new direction. It is a paper in search of others who have the necessary courage to try something new and hopefully better. For those that want the dots connected he was always associated with the relational model. A 'Call to Arms' was an invitation to leave the well established but flawed relation model and embrace a (new) object model. There are most probably many superficial people working in MS marketing. But obviously there are also mature and thoughful ones. The proportions are probably the same for users.

While his vision may be flawed his contributions to the database world are certainly not.

steve dassin | steve11228AT NOSPAMgmail dot com

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