Jim Gray

ACM A. M. Turing Award (1998)
ACM Fellows (1994)
ACM Software System Award (1988)
ACM Programming Systems and Languages Paper Award (1982)

ACM A. M. Turing Award

USA - 1998

citation

For seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.

For fundamental contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation from research prototypes to commercial products. The transaction is the fundamental abstraction underlying database system concurrency and failure recovery. Gray's work led to the definition of the desired key transaction properties: atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability; and his locking and recovery work demonstrated how to build database systems that exhibit these properties. His fault tolerance work explained how to use transactions to achieve high system availability.

ACM Fellows

USA - 1994

citation

ACM Software System Award

USA - 1988

System R

citation

Donald Chamberlin, James Gray, Raymond Lorie, Gianfranco Putzolu, Patricia Selinger, Irving Traiger

The INGRES and System R systems demonstrated that a practical and efficient database management system (DBMS) could be implemented based on the relational data model. These systems were full-function DBMS's that supported non-procedural query languages (QUEL and SQL), automatic query optimization, alternative storage structures, transactions, crash recovery, views, integrity, and protection. They have revolutionized the database system industry by showing how data stored in a computer can be conveniently accessed by end users and while at the same time it can be used by production application programs.

ACM Programming Systems and Languages Paper Award

USA - 1982

citation

The Recovery Manager of the System R Database Manager, ACM Computing Surveys, June 1981 (with Paul McJones, Michael Blasgen, Bruce Lindsay, Raymond Lorie, Thomas Price, Gianfranco Putzolu, Irving Traiger)