James N. Gray
Microsoft Corporation
January 12, 1944 - January 28, 2012
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Scientific Discipline: Computer and Information Sciences Membership Type:
Emeritus
(elected 2001)
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Jim Gray had a many-faceted and influential career as a computer-systems architect, engineer, and computer scientist; his work spanned foundation-building in various fields, the creation and measurement of tools, and their application. Gray’s five-decade professional life can be divided into periods, which include: creating a theory for transactions, participating in the building of the first relational-database system, and establishing design principles of database operating systems; engineering fault-tolerant transaction-processing systems and establishing measures for them; extending the applications of large data systems to scientists and consumers with the TerraServer (an online repository of public-domain aerial imagery and topographic maps) and the WorldWide Telescope; developing “lifelogging,” or “digital immortality”; and demonstrating “eScience” (data discovery using computers), or what he called the Fourth Paradigm of Science.
Gray received a B.S. in engineering mathematics in 1966 and his Ph.D. in programming languages in 1969 from the University of California, Berkeley. That same year he joined the staff of IBM Research, where he helped build the first relational database. His “Notes on Database Operating Systems,” written during this period, were critical to advancing the field. Joining Tandem Computers, Inc., in 1980, Gray was instrumental in creating the transaction-processing industry; for example, he led in the establishment of a standard measure of performance. Gray went to the Digital Equipment Corp. in 1990, where he produced two pioneering books—editing The Benchmark Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems and cowriting the Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques. He joined Microsoft Research in 1995 and for the next dozen years was involved in several groundbreaking pursuits there, including digital immortality, a TerraServer (for earth-image data), the SkyServer (for astronomical data), and eScience. In 1998, Gray received the Association for Computing Machinery’s prestigious A.M. Turing Award “for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.”
Gray’s career was unexpectedly cut short, much to the sorrow of his family and a vast array of colleagues and friends, when he was lost at sea January 28, 2007, during a trip to cast his mother’s ashes at the Farallon Islands near San Francisco.
