Michael Stonebraker has been one of the most creative innovators and serial entrepreneurs in the relational database management field (and in other software areas). He was a primary player (along with Gene Wong) in the design and development of INGRES while at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s and in founding of the Ingres Corporation with Gene and Larry Rowe in the early 1980s. Ingres became a major player in the RDBMS marketplace competing against Oracle and the other significant companies in the field. In the early 1990s he was the leader in creating Postgres and Illustra which extended the use of the relational structure into areas other than business data. Then he was involved as an executive with ASK, Cohera, Vertica Systems and Streambase. He continues to be an active leader in a multi university technology project in the New England region.
