Improving data management, through entrepreneurship
It’s been said that MIT adjunct professor of computer science Michael Stonebraker is a pioneer of modern database software. Through a series of academic projects and startups, starting in the 1970s, he’s brought to market technology that still drives much of the commercial database management system (DBMS) software available today — such as that released by Microsoft, IBM and others. Out of the six database-technology companies he’s co-founded since coming to MIT in 2001, perhaps most notable is Vertica Systems. It was one of a few companies that helped popularize the column-based DBMS — which could rapidly manage massive, fast-growing volumes of data — before its purchase by Hewlett-Packard (HP). Like most of Stonebraker’s ventures, Vertica Systems started as research. The company was built around an academic project called C-Store — developed at MIT by Stonebraker and other researchers — that stored data vertically, in columns, rather than in successive...