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Eight Transaction Papers by Jim Gray

by tkhattra on 4/19/24, 9:25 PM with 9 comments

• by watersb on 4/20/24, 6:45 AM

  I once had the privilege of spending a day with Jim Gray, when he visited the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico.

  At the time, he was interested in collecting as much astronomical data as possible, to create a unified model of the sky.

  He viewed it as a logical next step, after creating one of the first unified databases of Earth imagery (Microsoft Terraserver). "I love astronomers," he would sau, "They want to give the data away."

  If one can judge a person after a matter of a few hours, then I submit that all of the wonderful things to be said about Jim Gray are true.

  .

  One story about Terraserver: https://www.vice.com/en/article/8q89q4/microsofts-terraserve...

  S.G. Djorgovski1,2 and R. Williams, "Virtual Observatory: From Concept to Implementation", 2005 - PDF: https://authors.library.caltech.edu/28224/1/114.pdf

  WorldWide Telescope: https://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

• by beoberha on 4/20/24, 12:34 AM

  I work in the SQL Server org at Microsoft, though on the service side and not the databasey side. The reverence with which people who knew him talk about Jim Gray is truly awe inspiring.

  I don’t have much more to add beyond that. It’s one thing to know someone is a significant force due to their academic legacy, but another to see it in how people who knew them intimately speak of them after they are gone.

• by macintux on 4/19/24, 10:55 PM

  Jim Gray wrote a classic paper about fault tolerance that I often reference when talking about Erlang: Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?

  http://jimgray.azurewebsites.net/papers/tandemtr85.7_whydoco...

• by cafard on 4/19/24, 11:09 PM

  Gray and Reuter's Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques is excellent.