James Nicholas Gray (1944 – declared dead in absentia 2012) was an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (a ...

who received the

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...

in 1998 "for seminal contributions to

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

and

transaction processing Transaction processing is information processing in computer science that is divided into individual, indivisible operations called ''transactions''. Each transaction must succeed or fail as a complete unit; it can never be only partially compl ...

research and technical leadership in system implementation".

Early years and personal life

Gray was born in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17t ...

, the second child of Ann Emma Sanbrailo, a teacher, and James Able Gray, who was in the U.S. Army; the family moved to

Rome , established_title = Founded , established_date = 753 BC , founder = King Romulus ( legendary) , image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg , map_caption ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

, where Gray spent most of the first three years of his life; he learned to speak Italian before English. The family then moved to

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern regions of the United States, between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth are ...

, spending about four years there, until Gray's parents divorced, after which he returned to San Francisco with his mother. His father, an amateur inventor, patented a design for a ribbon cartridge for

typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectivel ...

s that earned him a substantial royalty stream. After being turned down for the

Air Force Academy An air force academy or air academy is a national institution that provides initial officer training, possibly including undergraduate level education, to air force officer cadets who are preparing to be commissioned officers in a national air for ...

he entered the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

as a freshman in 1961. To help pay for college he worked as a

co-op A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-control ...

for

General Dynamics General Dynamics Corporation (GD) is an American publicly traded, aerospace and defense corporation headquartered in Reston, Virginia. As of 2020, it was the fifth-largest defense contractor in the world by arms sales, and 5th largest in the Uni ...

, where he learned to use a Monroe calculator. Discouraged by his chemistry grades, he left Berkeley for six months, returning after an experience in industry he later described as "dreadful". Gray earned his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics (Math and Statistics) in 1966. After marrying, Gray moved with his wife Loretta to

New Jersey New Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York; on the east, southeast, and south by the Atlantic Ocean; on the west by the Delawa ...

, his wife's home state; she got a job as a teacher and he got one at

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mul ...

working on a digital simulation that was to be part of

Multics Multics ("Multiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of ...

. At Bell, he worked three days a week and spent two days as a Master's student at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

's Courant Institute. After a year they traveled for several months before settling again in Berkeley, where Gray entered graduate school with Michael A. Harrison as his advisor. In 1969 he received his Ph.D. in

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

s, then did two years of postdoctoral work for IBM. While at Berkeley, Gray and Loretta had a daughter; they were later divorced. His second wife was Donna Carnes.

Research

Gray pursued his career primarily working as a researcher and

software design Software design is the process by which an agent creates a specification of a software artifact intended to accomplish goals, using a set of primitive components and subject to constraints. Software design may refer to either "all the activi ...

er at a number of industrial companies, including IBM, Tandem Computers, and DEC. He joined

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...

in 1995 and was a Technical Fellow for the company until he was lost at sea in 2007. Gray contributed to several major database and transaction processing systems. IBM's System R was the precursor of the SQL relational databases that have become a standard throughout the world. For Microsoft, he worked on

TerraServer-USA Microsoft Research Maps (MSR Maps) was a free online repository of public domain aerial imagery and topographic maps provided by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The site was a collaboration between Microsoft Research (MSR), Bing Maps, ...

and Skyserver. His best-known achievements include: *

ACID In computer science, ACID ( atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) is a set of properties of database transactions intended to guarantee data validity despite errors, power failures, and other mishaps. In the context of databases, a se ...

, an acronym describing the requirements for reliable transaction processing and its software implementation * Granular database locking * Two-tier transaction commit semantics * The

Five-minute rule In computer science, the five-minute rule is a rule of thumb for deciding whether a data item should be kept in memory, or stored on disk and read back into memory when required. It was first formulated by Jim Gray and Gianfranco Putzolu in 1985 ...

for allocating storage * OLAP cube operator for

data warehousing In computing, a data warehouse (DW or DWH), also known as an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), is a system used for reporting and data analysis and is considered a core component of business intelligence. DWs are central repositories of integr ...

He assisted in developing Virtual Earth. He was also one of the co-founders of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research.

Disappearance

Gray, an experienced sailor, owned a sailboat. On January 28, 2007, he failed to return from a short solo trip to scatter his mother's ashes at the

Farallon Islands The Farallon Islands, or Farallones (from the Spanish ''farallón'' meaning "pillar" or "sea cliff"), are a group of islands and sea stacks in the Gulf of the Farallones, off the coast of San Francisco, California, United States. The isl ...

near

. The weather was clear, and no distress call was received, nor was any signal detected from the boat's automatic

Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon An Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) is a type of emergency locator beacon for commercial and recreational boats, a portable, battery-powered radio transmitter used in emergencies to locate boaters in distress and in need of ...

. A four-day

Coast Guard A coast guard or coastguard is a maritime security organization of a particular country. The term embraces wide range of responsibilities in different countries, from being a heavily armed military force with customs and security duties to ...

search using planes, helicopters, and boats found nothing. On February 1, 2007, the

DigitalGlobe DigitalGlobe is an American commercial vendor of space imagery and geospatial content, and operator of civilian remote sensing spacecraft. The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 May 2009, selling 14.7 million shares at US ...

satellite did a scan of the area and the thousands of images were posted to

Amazon Mechanical Turk Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website for businesses to hire remotely located "crowdworkers" to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owne ...

. Students, colleagues, and friends of Gray, and computer scientists around the world formed a "Jim Gray Group" to study these images for clues. On February 16 this search was suspended, and an underwater search using sophisticated equipment ended May 31. The

and Gray's family hosted a tribute on May 31, 2008. Microsoft's

WorldWide Telescope WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is an open-source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub. The .NET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is manage ...

software is dedicated to Gray. In 2008, Microsoft opened a research center in

Madison, Wisconsin Madison is the county seat of Dane County and the capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census the population was 269,840, making it the second-largest city in Wisconsin by population, after Milwaukee, and the 80th ...

, named after Jim Gray. On January 28, 2012, Gray was declared legally dead.

Jim Gray eScience Award

Each year,

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technolog ...

presents the Jim Gray eScience Award to a researcher who has made an outstanding contribution to the field of data-intensive computing. Award recipients are selected for their ground-breaking, fundamental contributions to the field of eScience. Previous award winners include

Alex Szalay Alex Szalay is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy and computer science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Arts and Sciences and Whiting School of Engineering.Brooks, Kell"Johns Hopkins names four new Bloomberg D ...

(2007),

Carole Goble Carole Anne Goble, (born 10 April 1961) is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator (PI) of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the Infor ...

(2008), Jeff Dozier (2009), Phil Bourne (2010), Mark Abbott (2011),

Antony John Williams Antony John Williams is a British chemist and expert in the fields of both nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and cheminformatics at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He is the founder of the ChemSpider website that ...

(2012), and Dr. David Lipman, M.D. (2013).

Notes

References

External links

Gray's Microsoft Research home page
last accessed 23 June 2013
James ("Jim") Nicholas Gray
Turing Award citation
Video
Behind the Code on Channel 9, interviewed by Barbara Fox, 2005
Video
The Future of Software and Databases, expert panel discussion with Rick Cattell, Don Chamberlin, Daniela Florescu, Jim Gray and Jim Melton, Software Development 2002 conference
Oral History Interview with Jim Gray

Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...

, University of Minnesota. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 3 January 2002, San Francisco, California.
The Future of Databases
SQL Down Under. Interview with Dr Greg Low, 2005.
Tribute
by Mark Whitehorn for

The Register ''The Register'' is a British technology news website co-founded in 1994 by Mike Magee, John Lettice and Ross Alderson. The online newspaper's masthead sublogo is "''Biting the hand that feeds IT''." Their primary focus is information tec ...

April 30, 2007
EE380: The Search for Jim Gray
Panel Discussion at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

video archive
May 28, 2008
Proceedings
May 31, 2008
Tribute
by James Hamilton
Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?
a technical report by Jim Gray, 1985
Gordon Bell, Leslie Lamport, and Butler W. Lampson, "James N. Gray", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2013)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gray, James N. 1944 births 2000s missing person cases 2007 deaths American computer scientists Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences alumni Database researchers Digital Equipment Corporation people Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery IBM Research computer scientists Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Microsoft employees Missing person cases in California Microsoft technical fellows People declared dead in absentia People lost at sea Scientists from California Turing Award laureates UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni