LinuxWorld - Dr. Stonebreaker to speak

Enclosed is a press release announcing Dr. Stonebreaker's session at LinuxWorld next week. I think this would be an interesting session to hear since he really doesn't mince words. ------------------------------------------- DBMS Megatrends for the Millennium Thursday, February 3 from 9:00am-10:15am EST Track 2, Session 32 Room 1E 15 Jacob Javits Center Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Informix Software, Inc. will be presenting at LinuxWorld for the first time. Dr. Stonebraker will explored "DBMS Megatrends for the Millenium" as they relate to Linux and other operating systems. Dr. Stonebraker is widely regarding as one of the most creative and pragmatic visionaries in the database field. Since creating Relational Technologies (later renamed Ingres) nearly 20 years ago, Dr. Stonebraker has been directly involved in bringing major architectural advances - relational (Ingres) and object-relational extensibility (POSTGRES, Illustra) to the marketplace. Stonebraker is the less famous in a two-man rivalry with Larry Ellison, Oracle Software CEO, that dates back to the time when almost all database software was licensed from IBM. Bill Rosenblatt, reviewing "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" in Sunworld commented, "The reason Ingres failed where Oracle succeeded was that whereas Stonebraker concentrated on excellence in engineering ( most database experts agree that Ingres was the superior product ) Ellison prevailed through flamboyant, aggressive salesmanship and marketing." In 1997, after Stonebraker joined Informix and it was announced that extensibility had been added to the high performance Informix DSA database engine Ellison told InfoWorld, " they did not -- integrate those two products. They did not, they cannot, they will not, it's impossible." Nevertheless, the integration was successful and Oracle quietly added a feature to their database engine called Data Cartridges, positioned as competitive to DataBlades. Dr. Stonebraker first developed and demonstrated the viability of the object-relational model with POSTGRES at Berkeley, where he has been a professor since 1971. He then co-founded Illustra Information Technologies, which developed and sold the first commercial object- relational database and introduced the concept of DataBlades. (DataBlades allowed application developers to use powerful computer languages such as C++ and more recently Java directly within the database server. By extending the reach of these languages, both the application development and architectural networking model are significantly simplified and performance improved, particularly for computationally intensive tasks such as management of sophisticated Web sites, eCommerce transactions across the Internet, and real-time DataMarts and DataWarehouses.) Dr. Stonebraker is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Informix Software, a position he has held since a 1996 merger with Illustra. As noted above, he also serves as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of "The Object-Relational DBMSs" and a second edition (co-authored with Paul Brown), "Object-Relational DBMSs, the Next Great Wave", Morgan- Kaufmann Publishers, 1996 and 1998, respectively. Dr. Stonebraker received a bachelor of science degree from Princeton University and master of science and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan. ------------------------------------------- Carlton ______________________________________________________________________ Carlton Doe DBA Resources, Inc. Salt Lake City, UT dbaresrc at xmission dot com http://www.xmission.com/~dbaresrc carlton at iiug dot org http://www.iiug.org