Michael Stonebraker

Relational databases. At Berkeley Stonebraker led Ingres in the 1970s and Postgres in the 1980s, academic prototypes whose freely available code seeded a generation of database products, PostgreSQL among them. He has repeatedly turned his research into companies, including Ingres, Illustra, Vertica, VoltDB and Tamr, each built to test a new idea about storing data. He received the Turing Award in 2014.