SIGMOD

In this paper, I discuss ambiguous loss, why it is so traumatizing, what to do to lower the distress when someone disappears without a trace, and why a tribute is more appropriate than a memorial. The paper is dedicated to the family, friends, and ...

In the days that followed Jim's disappearance at sea, his family, friends and colleagues came together in a remarkable effort to help find him. The group gathered, analyzed and filtered information from many sources. In concert with the Coast Guard, the ...

Jim Gray spent a decade as a student and researcher at Berkeley. In action, he is remembered for his breadth, his depth, and his generosity.

Jim Gray was my mentor and friend for almost 25 years. Even before we met, he was changing my life through his writings. Jim continually and patiently nudged me to strive for more, accomplish more, and to pass these gifts on to others. He embodied those ...

There are hundreds of us in academia and industry who consider ourselves FoJ: Friends of Jim. Jim invested so deeply and so uniquely in every one of us that we each felt we must be "the chosen one." And we were: Jim had so much to give that he was able ...

This short paper is intended to describe for the layman why Jim Gray won so many awards, culminating in his being selected to receive the 1998 ACM Turing Award, arguably the "Nobel Prize of Computer Science". It briefly summarizes his main contributions ...

Jim Gray was successful in many aspects of his life. Not only did he have a profound influence on the computer industry, but also on all of the people that he interacted with along the way. It is this balance contribution to society that makes Jim truly ...

I knew Jim Gray as a colleague, a friend and an employee. He created the first Microsoft Research group outside of our initial research lab in Redmond, WA. Jim's impact on industry and science was not limited to his own area of research. He championed ...

While at the IBM San Jose Research Laboratory, in the 1970's, Dr. Jim Gray defined and developed the fundamental concepts and techniques that underlie on-line transaction processing systems. Jim Gray's pivotal contributions enabled cost efficient, on-...

This paper discusses the contributions and accomplishments of Jim Gray while he was at Tandem Computers between 1980 and the early 1990s.

This paper examines Jim Gray's role in the specification of the debit/credit benchmark. The publication of this benchmark in a 1985 paper launched a benchmark war among the vendors that resulted in dramatic improvements in database system performance in ...

James Nicholas Gray's understanding and experimentation gave him a special perspective. From 1995 his commitment was building indefinitely scalable tools by working on really hard data-intensive application problems with other scientific disciplines. ...

In this article I will reflect on the writing of "Transaction Processing -- Concepts and Techniques" [1], which appeared at Morgan Kaufmann Publishers in 1992. The process of writing had many aspects of a typical software project: In the end, the book ...

Jim Gray made many friends and few enemies in his career. Many of the projects he worked on were inspired by one or more of his friends and collaborators in industry and academia.

The original idea for an "image server" happened in the early 1990s when ...

Our collaboration with Jim Gray has created some of the world's largest astronomy databases, and has enabled us to test many avant-garde ideas in practice. The astronomers have been very receptive to these and embraced Jim as a 'card carrying member' of ...

This paper is talks about the critical role that Jim Gray played in the creation of the WorldWide Telescope software. Contrary to what you might think it wasn't his database brilliance that made it happen, it was his generosity in sharing credit, ...

On January 28^th, 2007, Jim Gray sailed his 40 foot sailboat, Tenacious, on a day cruise to the Farallon Islands off San Francisco and was reported overdue when he didn't return as scheduled. The immediate and comprehensive above water search for Jim and ...

In fall of 2004, we met Jim Gray and began to converse about the data needs of ocean scientists. The conversations ultimately led to the development of a unique portal for exploring multidisciplinary data sets, which we call the Metadata Oriented Query ...