Making the most of it: Jim Gray
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Silicon Valley has more than its share of wild-eyed visionaries, people who have big ideas and then put shoulder to the wheel, doing the hard work to make their dreams come true.
Jim Gray, a pioneer in the database field, was one of those people, according to those who spoke at a tribute for him Saturday at UC Berkeley. But what made him extraordinary was his low-key approach. Gray, head of Microsoft’s research center in San Francisco, deflected attention away from himself and focused on others. He had two rules, Microsoft colleague Pat Helland said: He who types the paper gets to have his name first, and it’s easier to add a name to a research paper than to deal with hard feelings later. ‘I coauthored papers with Jim when I wasn’t even looking,’ Helland told the gathering.
When a young scientist once kvetched to Gray that it would be hard to enter a field with such a towering giant, Gray offered this comfort: ‘It’s cooler in the shade.’
Gray disappeared in January 2007 after heading his sailboat toward the San Francisco Bay Area’s Farallon Islands to scatter his mother’s ashes. The Coast Guard and the technology community launched an exhaustive search for him. After that search ended, Gray’s family continued to search underwater. No trace of Gray or his boat, Tenacious, has been found.
In the more than a year since, family and friends have struggled with...
... how to commemorate Gray’s life, given the ambiguity around his disappearance. They did it with gusto and pathos over the weekend with the kind of tech symposium Gray liked to attend. Among the talks from experts in database technology, oceanography and astronomy, there were also presentations about the science involved in the search itself. It was announced that a Jim Gray Chair in Computer Systems would be established at Berkeley, with contributions from notable people such as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Papers in preparation of the event were published in SIGMOD Record, a publication of the Assn. for Computing Machinery. The Record included a 2002 interview with Gray in which he talked about how he began to sail. ‘I believe one should have an integrated life; that one should integrate work and play,’ he said. ‘I had this fantasy about sailboats that said that you bought a sailboat and then you sailed it around.’ (He recounted taking a boat he wanted to get rid of into the middle of San Francisco Bay at night and sinking it with a hatchet).
A boss once put a sign on his door that read, ‘Code faster.’ And Gray responded, ‘Just fire me.’
‘I always tried to be in a situation where I could quit the job I was doing that very day,’ he said. ‘I think that was liberating. Of course, it made me a manager’s nightmare.’
A manager’s nightmare though he may have been, he inspired many. ‘The world needs a couple of lunatics,’ he said.
--Michelle Quinn
Photo: Jim Gray in front of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Gray worked on a database project called the SkyServer that helped the effort. Credit: Alexander S. Szalay.