Michael Stonebraker wins Turing Award
For those who are unfamiliar with his work, he worked on ingres, and postgres, which are now the bases for postgresql.<p>He worked on Aurora (<a href="http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~magda/aurora-medusa.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~magda/aurora-medusa.pdf</a>), which I don't think ever got a lot of commercial success, but was one of the earlier stream databases.<p>He also has some amazing work on non-traditional databases, for example he worked on H-store (<a href="http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/</a>) which is now voltdb, which is an in-memory distributed database.<p>And then C-Store was the basis for Vertica: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store</a><p>I'm pretty sure Margo Seltzer (of BerkeleyDB fame) was his student at some point too.<p>Truly amazing researcher - and I think an example to those who focus on a teeny tiny minor niche their entire career and never explore anything else.