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.He worked on Aurora (http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~magda/aurora-medusa.pdf), which I don't think ever got a lot of commercial success, but was one of the earlier stream databases.He also has some amazing work on non-traditional databases, for example he worked on H-store (http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/) which is now voltdb, which is an in-memory distributed database.And then C-Store was the basis for Vertica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-StoreI'm pretty sure Margo Seltzer (of BerkeleyDB fame) was his student at some point too.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.