Michael Stonebraker

Data Base guru

http://www.csail.mit.edu/biographies/PI/bioprint.php?PeopleID=883

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker

He is also the founder of Ingres, Illus Tra, Cohera, Stream Base Systems and Vertica and was previously the CTO of Inform Ix.

This included Stonebraker, who left Berkeley in 1982 to help found Ingres Corporation, which was later sold to ComputerAssociates and was recently re-established as an independent company in 2005. After the sale in 1994, Stonebraker returned to Berkeley. Upon his return he started a "post-ingres" effort to address the limitations of the relational model, naming the new project Postgres. Postgres offered a number of features that effectively made the database "understand" the data inside it, dramatically improving programmability. Postgres was also offered using a BSD-like license, and the code forms the basis of today's free software, PostgreSQL.