Who are you looking for?Famoose.co
Appearance
Text size
Page width
Colour
Discover›Technology
Contents
Jim Gray
Computer scientist

Jim Gray

Famoose for

Developing foundational methods for reliable database transactions.

Transaction protocols · Transaction Processing

Born
12 January 1944
Birthplace
San Francisco, United States

More people

Ada LovelaceRecognising what a programmable machine could do beyond arithmetic.Alan TuringHelping break Enigma and laying foundations for computer science.Grace HopperHelping make computer programming readable in English-like language.

Jim Gray

Jim Gray was an American computer scientist whose work helped databases preserve correct results despite failures and concurrent activity.

Early life

Mobile childhood

Spent parts of his childhood in Rome, Virginia and San Francisco.

Berkeley education

Studied engineering mathematics and completed a computer-science doctorate.

Career

  1. 1969

    Doctorate

    Completed his PhD at Berkeley.

  2. 1970s

    IBM research

    Worked on the experimental relational database System R.

  3. 1995

    Microsoft

    Joined as a researcher and technical leader.

Contributions

Transaction protocols

Helped establish methods for coordinating reliable updates.

Transaction Processing

Co-authored a major textbook with Andreas Reuter.

Turing Award

Received computing’s leading award for database and transaction research.

Beyond the lab

Sailing

Disappeared during a solo sailing trip in 2007; his fate remains unknown.

Research community

Colleagues organised extensive searches and later created awards in his memory.

Sources & photo creditBiography and career ↗Further source ↗

Photo: Microsoft Research. CC BY-SA 3.0 us · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.