The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) congratulates Michael Stonebraker from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on receiving the 2014 ACM Turing Award for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems.

From the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Website:

An adjunct professor of computer science and engineering at MIT and a principal investigator at CSAIL, Stonebraker sometimes jokes that he didn’t know what he was researching for more than 30 years. “But then, out of nowhere, some marketing guys started talking about ‘big data,’” he says. “That’s when I realized that I’d been studying this thing for the better part of my academic life.”

From the Turing Award website: 

Stonebreaker is the inventor of many concepts that were crucial to making databases a reality and that are used in almost all modern database systems. His work on INGRES introduced the notion of query modification, used for integrity constraints and views. His later work on Postgres introduced the object-relational model, effectively merging databases with abstract data types while keeping the database separate from the programming language.

The A.M. Turing Award, the ACM’s most prestigious technical award, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. Recipients are invited to give the annual A.M. Turing Award Lecture. This year marks the first time that the Turing Award comes with a Google-funded $1 million prize.

See the full press release here.