Conversation with scientist, engineer and database legend Jim Gray

Posted By: Charles | Mar 3rd, 2006 @ 1:56 PM

This episode features Jim Gray. He is a "Technical Fellow" in the Scaleable Servers Research Group (Sky Server, Terra Server) and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC). Jim has been called a "giant" in the fields of database and transaction processing computer systems. In 1998, Jim was awarded the ACM’s prestigious A.M. Turing Award.

Before joining Microsoft, Jim worked at Digital Equipment Corp (DEC)., Tandem Computers Inc., IBM Corp. and AT&T and he is the editor of the “Performance Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems,” and co-author of “Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques.” In this interview, Jim is joined by former colleague from DEC and partner on the Terra Server project, Researcher, Tom Barclay.

This episode of “Behind the Code” is hosted by Barbara Fox – former senior security architect of cryptography and digital rights management for Microsoft

Tags: MS Personalities, Web Services

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SlackmasterK
I write my OWN blogging engines

Someone changed the graphic associated with this video; I thought it was a Part 2. Was the other pic not good enough?

Charles
Welcome Change

Random change. There's no hidden meaning...
C

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

That is too cool. I am working on a pipe-line server like this. It is a nice way to go. There is some potential issues however. Each "stage" has a thread or a thread pool with some max. If one of the sync threads gets blocked for extra long (i.e. network delay, error, hack, etc), more worker thread(s) spin-up for the stage. So far so good. But on a busy server with a lot of connections, it is possible to max the workers for a stage and block the whole server. Naturally, this could happen even if the stage was total async as well. Eventually memory/resources would run out posting callbacks. Still, I think I like this sync pipe-line better. Here are some interesting works on related design:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/papers/seda-sosp01.pdf
http://apache.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/document/4_3Multitasking_server.html

Does MS (e.g. Jim) have any papers on same? TIA

Zeo
Channel 9 :)

Jim Gray is really amazing....however I did a little bit of digging on the host of "Behind the Code", Barbara Fox.

She's pretty amazing too.

Barbara Fox
Barbara Fox is a Senior Software Architect, Cryptography and Digital Rights Management for Microsoft Corporation. She is also currently a Senior Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She serves on the National Academies of Science Committee on "Authentication Technologies and Their Implications for Privacy," the Technical Advisory Board of "The Creative Commons," and the Board of Directors of the International Financial Cryptography Association. Ms. Fox joined Microsoft in 1993 as Director of Advanced Product Development and led the company's electronic commerce technology development group. She has co-authored Internet standards in the areas of Public Key Infrastructure and XML security. Her research at Harvard focuses on digital copyright law, public policy, and privacy.

Immediately prior to Microsoft, Ms. Fox was President of SystemSoft America, a Macintosh software development company in Palo Alto, California, and in addition she was a consultant to Visa International. Between 1981 and 1984, she was Engineering Development Manager for AppleTalk at Apple Computer.

I'd love to have C9 interview her for the WM_IN series.... Smiley