1998 詹姆斯·尼古拉·格雷

shiyi18

Jim Gray
  Photo-Essay

BIRTH:
12 January 1944, San Francisco, California, USA

DEATH:
Disappeared at sea 28 January 2007; declared legally dead as of 28 January 2012.

EDUCATION:
Westmoor High School, San Francisco, California; Departments of Mathematics and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, BS (Mathematics and Engineering, 1966); Courant Institute, New York University (1966); Department of Computer Science, UC Berkeley, PhD (Computer Science, 1969).

EXPERIENCE:
Co-op Student, General Dynamics Astronautics, San Diego, CA (1962-1963); Reader, Mathematics Department, University of California, Berkeley (1964); Research Assistant, Electronics Research Laboratory, UC Berkeley (1965–1966); Member of Technical Staff, Bell Telephone Laboratory, Whippany, NJ (1966–1967); Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, UC Berkeley (1967–1969); IBM Post Doctoral Fellow, Dept. of Computer Science, UC Berkeley (1969–1971); Research Staff Member, General Science Department, IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY (1971–1972); UNESCO Expert, Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania (1972); Research Staff Member, Computer Science Department, IBM Research, San Jose, CA (1972–1980); Software Designer, Tandem Computers, Cupertino, CA (1980–1990); Department of Computer Science, Stanford University (spring 1988); Corporate Consulting Engineer, Digital Equipment Corporation (1990–1994); McKay Fellow, Computer Science Department, University of California, Berkeley (1994–1995); Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research, San Francisco, CA (1995–2000); Distinguished Engineer (2000–2007).

HONORS AND AWARDS:
Honorary Doctorate of Natural Science, University of Stuttgart (1990); ACM Turing Award (1998); IEEE Charles Babbage Award (1998); Microsoft’s Jim Gray eScience Award named after him (1998); John Wesley Powell Award (with Tom Barclay for TerraServer) (2000); Honorary Doctorate, University of Paris Dauphine (2004); Member of National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, American Academy of Arts And Sciences, and the European Academy of Science. For a complete list of Gray’s awards and affiliations, see the Vita section of his professional web site at Microsoft.

JAMES ("JIM") NICHOLAS GRAY DL Author Profile link
United States – 1998
CITATION
For seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.

SHORT ANNOTATED
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACM TURING AWARD
LECTURE
RESEARCH
SUBJECTS
ADDITIONAL
MATERIALS
VIDEO INTERVIEW
James Nicholas Gray was born in San Francisco, California on 12 January 1944. He was raised by his mother, an English teacher, who encouraged her two children to read and make frequent visits to the aquarium or planetarium or to a museum. In 1961 Gray graduated from Westmoor High School in San Francisco.

Gray spent most of the next decade across the bay, at the University of California, Berkeley. His initial plan was to major in physics. Two stints in a co-op program at an aerospace company gave him a greater appreciation for the academic environment. He took graduate courses and carried out research work, graduating in 1966 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and engineering. After spending a year in New Jersey working at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill and attending classes at the Courant Institute in New York City, he returned to Berkeley and enrolled in the newly-formed computer science department, earning a Ph.D. in 1969 for work on context-free grammars and formal language theory. (On the additional materials page you can find a link to a reflection on Gray's student days by his advisor Michael Harrison. The same page includes tributes from many others who worked with Gray at different stages of his career).

He spent the next two years as a postdoctoral fellow, sponsored by IBM Corporation. During this time he served as the director of the CAL Timesharing System research project, a research project to build a secure and reliable operating system. In 1971 Gray became a research staff member of IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY. Inspired by work he’d done during his postdoctoral fellowship on urban modeling, he joined the General Science Department and worked on land-use mapping. During this period he met John Cocke, who suggested the challenge of scalable computing: finding a way to interconnect computers so that spending twice as much for computer hardware would allow a large computing problem to be solved twice as fast.

Gray’s first job at IBM was evaluating the models behind the famous ‘Limits to Growth’ report published in 1972.       
After a winter in New York, Gray decided he wanted to move back to California. But first he spent the summer of 1972 as a UNESCO Expert at the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest in Romania. Back in California, he accepted an offer from IBM’s San Jose Research Laboratory (now IBM Almaden). The San Jose Research Laboratory was collocated with IBM’s General Products Division, which designed and manufactured computer disk drives. Database management was a research focus, and one of the lab members, Edgar F. Codd, had published an influential paper proposing a new way to organize database systems, called the relational model.

Gray compares the relational database model to earlier approaches.       
Several projects at IBM and elsewhere were begun with the goal of building practical systems based on Codd’s relational model. In 1973, IBM research management decided to combine people from the Watson and San Jose Laboratories into a single project located in San Jose. Gray soon joined this project, which became known as System R. The project continued for five years and — together with the Ingres project at the University of California, Berkeley — served as the foundation for the relational database industry. Ray Boyce and Don Chamberlin designed the widely-used SQL query language for System R.

Gray played a major role in System R, combining his experience with systems and theory to create a unified approach to the interrelated problems of concurrency control and crash recovery. He defined the transaction as a unit of work, such as moving money from one bank account to another, that must leave the bank’s database in a consistent state whether or not the transaction succeeds: either the money moves, or it stays in the original account. Gray developed techniques that allowed concurrent execution of many transactions, as well as restart after crashes, while maintaining the consistency of the database. He proved the correctness of the approach. This work was the foundation for his Turing Award. As the research component of System R wound down, Gray helped transfer the technology to IBM product groups and began thinking about how to extend transactions to a distributed network of communicating computers.

Gray explains the importance of transactions to database systems and the ACID criteria for implementing them.       
In 1980, Gray made a career change, moving to Tandem Computers, where he spent the next decade. Tandem had pioneered the use of fault-tolerant hardware and software in commercial systems. Its approach of interconnecting isolated computers with a high-speed network promised the scalability that John Cocke had proposed a decade earlier. The scope of Gray’s work at Tandem moved beyond the research-to-production transfer he’d done at IBM, to extensive involvement in product development and activities involving Tandem customers and the entire field of data processing. An important example of his product development activity was the leadership role he played in the NonStop SQL relational database management system, which was tightly integrated with Tandem’s operating system and communication software, and featured fault tolerance, high availability, and scalable performance. Gray was involved from the initial conception: obtaining management approval, recruiting engineers, leading the architecture design, and participating in coding and tuning.

Gray believed that the relational database model and the SQL data access language were sound foundations for online applications, but he was concerned about the difficulty customers had comparing the offerings from various hardware and software vendors. He designed end user-oriented performance benchmarks, and helped establish a vendor-neutral organization, the Transaction Processing Performance Council, to oversee their impartial implementation. This led to more than a decade of strong competition between vendors to improve their products.

Gray discusses benchmarks for database systems performance and his "stunts" to promote them.       
Gray’s interest in fault tolerance led him to work with Tandem customers to study the cause of system failures. He published one of the first papers with statistics from production fault tolerant systems, demonstrating that the most common sources of system failure were system administration and software bugs. As customer need for geographical distribution of computer systems and terminal networks increased, Gray studied how such distribution interacted with availability, consistency, and other desirable properties of the overall system. The many technical reports and papers he published while at Tandem helped customers plan their applications, helped Tandem engineers plan enhancements to their products, and contributed to the open literature on a wide variety of topics related to performance, reliability, availability, and ease of use.

After a decade at Tandem, Gray moved to Digital Equipment Corporation in 1990, where he started a small laboratory in San Francisco. Over the next four years he consulted with product groups for the Rdb relational database management system and the ACMS transaction-processing monitor. In addition, he and his co-author Andreas Reuter completed the book Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques. They had begun the work in 1986 as preparation for a one-week seminar; it evolved into a 1000-page book published in 1992. Building on their combined experience designing and teaching algorithms and systems, the authors presented an integrated view of the overall architecture as well as many details faced by the implementers of transaction processing systems. Completing the book marked a turning point for Gray, ending his focus on transaction processing systems.

In 1994 Gray resigned from Digital and accepted a Mackay Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. He participated in the Sequoia 2000 project, which was designing a Geographic Information System to support global change research.

During 1994-1995, Gray and Gordon Bell proposed to Microsoft that they establish an advanced development laboratory in San Francisco dedicated to servers and scalability. Microsoft agreed, and a small staff was hired. Over the next dozen years, Gray set the goal for himself “to put all the world’s scientific data online, along with tools to analyze the data.” He worked with colleagues at Microsoft and several universities to build a series of systems that applied the growing power of commodity hardware and software to a series of applications allowing access, search, and computation on large-scale scientific data. TerraServer allowed access to newly-available satellite imagery with resolution of 1.5 meters/pixel. SkyServer, a collaboration with Alexander Szalay and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins, allowed access to astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. SkyServer led to additional work with astronomical data, and Gray also worked with others to show how to apply the approach to other fields such as molecular biology, sensor networks for environmental science, and oceanography.

Gray had a lifelong interest in teaching and mentoring others. He taught formal and informal courses at Stanford University, gave lectures at universities around the world, and served on a wide range of program committees, editorial boards, and advisory boards. Taken together, his research, system building, mentoring, writing, teaching, and speaking had a large positive impact on almost everyone involved commercially or academically in the field of online transaction processing. Our modern society depends on online transaction processing for banking, ecommerce, and a host of other applications.

On January 28, 2007, Gray failed to return from sailing his 40-foot sloop Tenacious around the Farallon Islands. The Coast Guard conducted a comprehensive search but found no signs of the boat. Friends and colleagues of Gray conducted an innovative search using satellite imagery and cloud computing, but were also unsuccessful. A four-month long search of the seabed covering approximately 1000 square kilometers and using a state-of-the-art technology (including multibeam echosounders and remotely operated vehicles) was equally unsuccessful. After the legally-mandated waiting period, a court granted a petition to have him declared dead as of January 28, 2012.

Author: Paul McJones
Jim Gray's sister Gail Gordon and his wife Donna Carnes
provided encouragement and suggestions
that improved this article.



吉姆-格雷
  照片-散文

出生地：美国
1944年1月12日，美国加州，旧金山

死亡。
2007年1月28日在海上失踪；从2012年1月28日起被宣布为合法死亡。

教育情况。
加利福尼亚州旧金山威斯摩尔高中；加州大学伯克利分校数学和工程系，学士学位（数学和工程，1966年）；纽约大学库兰特学院（1966年）；加州大学伯克利分校计算机科学系，博士学位（计算机科学，1969年）。

工作经验。
在加州圣地亚哥的通用动力宇航公司实习（1962-1963）；加州大学伯克利分校数学系学生（1964）；加州大学伯克利分校电子研究实验室研究助理（1965-1966）；新泽西州Whippany贝尔电话实验室技术员（1966-1967）；加州大学伯克利分校计算机科学系研究助理（1967-1969）；加州大学伯克利分校计算机科学系IBM博士后研究员。加州大学伯克利分校计算机科学系博士后研究员（1969-1971年）；纽约州约克敦高地IBM研究中心普通科学部研究人员（1971-1972年）；罗马尼亚布加勒斯特理工学院联合国教科文组织专家（1972年）；加州圣何塞IBM研究中心计算机科学部研究人员（1972-1980年）；加州库珀蒂诺Tandem计算机公司软件设计师（1980-1990年）。斯坦福大学计算机科学系（1988年春）；数字设备公司企业咨询工程师（1990-1994）；加州大学伯克利分校计算机科学系麦凯研究员（1994-1995）；微软研究院高级研究员，加州旧金山（1995-2000）；杰出工程师（2000-2007）。

荣誉和奖项。
斯图加特大学荣誉自然科学博士（1990年）；ACM图灵奖（1998年）；IEEE查尔斯-巴贝奇奖（1998年）；微软以他名字命名的吉姆-格雷电子科学奖（1998年）；约翰-韦斯利-鲍威尔奖（与汤姆-巴克利一起为TerraServer获奖）（2000年）；巴黎多芬大学荣誉博士（2004年）；国家工程院、国家科学院、美国艺术与科学学院和欧洲科学院成员。有关格雷的奖项和附属机构的完整清单，请参见他在微软的专业网站上的简历部分。

JAMES ("JIM") NICHOLAS GRAY DL作者简介链接
美国 - 1998年
奖状
对数据库和事务处理研究的开创性贡献，以及在系统实施方面的技术领导力。

简短注释
书目
亚马逊图灵奖
讲座
研究
主题
额外的
材料
视频采访
詹姆斯-尼古拉斯-格雷于1944年1月12日出生在加利福尼亚州的旧金山。他由母亲抚养长大，母亲是一名英语教师，她鼓励两个孩子读书，并经常去水族馆或天文馆或博物馆参观。1961年，格雷从旧金山的威斯特摩尔高中毕业。

在接下来的十年里，格雷大部分时间都在海湾对面的加州大学伯克利分校度过。他最初的计划是主修物理学。在一家航空航天公司的合作项目中的两段经历使他对学术环境有了更多的了解。他参加了研究生课程并进行了研究工作，于1966年毕业，获得了数学和工程学士学位。在新泽西州默里山的贝尔实验室工作了一年，并在纽约市的库兰特学院上课后，他回到伯克利，进入新成立的计算机科学系学习，并于1969年获得博士学位，从事无上下文语法和形式语言理论研究。(在附加材料页面，你可以找到格雷的导师迈克尔-哈里森对他学生时代的反思链接。同一页面还包括许多在格雷职业生涯的不同阶段与他共事的人的颂词）。

在接下来的两年里，他在IBM公司的赞助下做了博士后研究员。在这期间，他担任了CAL分时系统研究项目的主任，这是一个建立安全可靠的操作系统的研究项目。1971年，格雷成为位于纽约州约克敦高地的IBM沃森研究中心的研究人员。受他在博士后研究期间所做的城市建模工作的启发，他加入了综合科学部，从事土地使用制图工作。在此期间，他遇到了约翰-科克，后者提出了可扩展计算的挑战：找到一种将计算机互连的方法，使花费两倍的计算机硬件就能以两倍的速度解决一个大型计算问题。

格雷在IBM的第一份工作是评估1972年发表的著名的 "增长的极限 "报告背后的模型。       
在纽约过了一个冬天后，格雷决定他想搬回加利福尼亚。但他首先在1972年夏天作为联合国教科文组织专家在罗马尼亚的布加勒斯特理工学院工作了一段时间。回到加州后，他接受了IBM圣何塞研究实验室（现在的IBM Almaden）的邀请。圣何塞研究实验室与IBM的通用产品部合署办公，后者设计和制造计算机磁盘驱动器。数据库管理是一个研究重点，实验室成员之一埃德加-F-科德（Edgar F. Codd）发表了一篇有影响力的论文，提出了一种组织数据库系统的新方法，称为关系模型。

格雷将关系型数据库模型与早期的方法进行了比较。       
在IBM和其他地方开始了几个项目，目标是建立基于Codd的关系模型的实用系统。1973年，IBM研究管理层决定将沃森和圣何塞实验室的人员合并到位于圣何塞的一个项目中。该项目持续了五年，与加州大学伯克利分校的Ingres项目一起，成为关系型数据库行业的基础。Ray Boyce和Don Chamberlin为System R设计了广泛使用的SQL查询语言。

Gray在System R中发挥了重要作用，他将自己在系统和理论方面的经验结合起来，为并发控制和崩溃恢复等相互关联的问题创造了一个统一的方法。他将交易定义为一个工作单位，例如将钱从一个银行账户转移到另一个账户，无论交易是否成功，都必须使银行的数据库处于一致的状态：要么钱被转移，要么留在原来的账户中。格雷开发了一些技术，允许许多交易的并发执行，以及在崩溃后重新启动，同时保持数据库的一致性。他证明了该方法的正确性。这项工作是他获得图灵奖的基础。随着System R的研究部分的结束，Gray帮助将该技术转移到IBM产品组，并开始思考如何将事务扩展到一个由通信计算机组成的分布式网络。

Gray解释了事务对数据库系统的重要性以及实现事务的ACID标准。       
1980年，Gray改变了职业，转到Tandem计算机公司，在那里度过了十年。Tandem公司率先在商业系统中使用了容错硬件和软件。它用高速网络将孤立的计算机互联起来的方法，承诺了约翰-科克十年前提出的可扩展性。格雷在Tandem的工作范围超越了他在IBM所做的研究到生产的转移，广泛参与产品开发和涉及Tandem客户和整个数据处理领域的活动。他的产品开发活动的一个重要例子是他在NonStop SQL关系数据库管理系统中发挥的领导作用，该系统与Tandem的操作系统和通信软件紧密结合，具有容错性、高可用性和可扩展性能。格雷从最初的构思就参与其中：获得管理层的批准，招募工程师，领导架构设计，并参与编码和调整。

格雷认为，关系数据库模型和SQL数据访问语言是在线应用的良好基础，但他担心客户在比较不同硬件和软件供应商的产品时遇到困难。他设计了面向终端用户的性能基准，并帮助建立了一个供应商中立的组织--事务处理性能委员会，以监督其公正的实施。这导致了供应商之间十多年的强烈竞争，以改善他们的产品。

格雷讨论了数据库系统性能的基准和他推广这些基准的 "绝技"。       
格雷对容错的兴趣使他与Tandem客户合作，研究系统故障的原因。他发表了最早的一篇论文，其中有来自生产容错系统的统计数据，表明系统故障的最常见来源是系统管理和软件错误。随着客户对计算机系统和终端网络的地理分布需求的增加，格雷研究了这种分布与可用性、一致性和整个系统的其他理想属性之间的相互作用。在Tandem工作期间，他发表的许多技术报告和论文帮助客户规划他们的应用，帮助Tandem工程师规划他们产品的改进，并为与性能、可靠性、可用性和易用性有关的各种主题的公开文献做出贡献。

在Tandem工作了十年后，Gray于1990年转到数字设备公司，在那里他在旧金山建立了一个小型实验室。在接下来的四年里，他为Rdb关系数据库管理系统和ACMS事务处理监视器的产品组提供咨询。此外，他和他的合作者Andreas Reuter完成了《事务处理》一书。Concepts and Techniques》一书。他们于1986年开始这项工作，为一个为期一周的研讨会做准备；后来发展成为一本1000页的书，于1992年出版。基于他们在设计和教授算法和系统方面的综合经验，作者对整体结构以及交易处理系统实施者所面临的许多细节提出了一个综合观点。这本书的完成标志着格雷的一个转折点，结束了他对交易处理系统的关注。

1994年，Gray从Digital辞职，接受了加州大学伯克利分校的Mackay奖学金。他参加了红杉2000项目，该项目正在设计一个地理信息系统以支持全球变化研究。

1994-1995年期间，格雷和戈登-贝尔向微软提议在旧金山建立一个高级开发实验室，专门研究服务器和可扩展性。微软同意了，并雇用了一个小职员。在接下来的十几年里，格雷为自己设定的目标是 "把世界上所有的科学数据放在网上，同时提供分析数据的工具"。他与微软和几所大学的同事合作，建立了一系列系统，将商品硬件和软件不断增长的力量应用于一系列允许访问、搜索和计算大规模科学数据的应用程序。TerraServer允许访问新获得的分辨率为1.5米/像素的卫星图像。SkyServer是与Alexander Szalay和他在约翰霍普金斯大学的同事合作，允许访问斯隆数字天空调查的天文数据。SkyServer带来了更多关于天文数据的工作，格雷还与其他人合作，展示如何将该方法应用于其他领域，如分子生物学、环境科学的传感器网络和海洋学。

格雷一生都对教学和指导他人感兴趣。他在斯坦福大学教授正式和非正式的课程，在世界各地的大学发表演讲，并在各种计划委员会、编辑委员会和咨询委员会任职。总的来说，他的研究、系统建设、指导、写作、教学和演讲对几乎所有参与在线交易处理领域的商业或学术活动的人都产生了巨大的积极影响。我们的现代社会在银行、电子商务和许多其他应用方面都依赖于在线交易处理。

2007年1月28日，格雷驾驶他的40英尺单桅帆船 "顽强 "号在法拉隆群岛附近航行后没有回来。海岸警卫队进行了全面搜索，但没有发现船的踪迹。格雷的朋友和同事利用卫星图像和云计算进行了一次创新的搜索，但也没有成功。长达四个月的海底搜索覆盖了大约1000平方公里，使用了最先进的技术（包括多波束回声探测仪和遥控车），同样没有成功。在法律规定的等待期过后，法院批准了一项申请，宣布他于2012年1月28日死亡。

作者。Paul McJones
吉姆-格雷的姐姐盖尔-戈登和他的妻子唐娜-卡恩斯
提供了鼓励和建议
完善了这篇文章。