 So now we have the the ending session, so we just have two more talks Magda and myself if you want to count me Magda Balazinska is a professor at the University of Washington So this category is listed as students It's not technically Mike students in the official sense that maybe like you know Margo my goals in is it's students That have worked with Mike here Why he's been at MIT? Go Magda go Does someone turn it on? Oh, thank you. All right. Thanks everyone. So Actually a few weeks ago some emailed me and says hey Magda Do you want to see if you think about what it was like to work with Mike when you were a student here? And I thought you know boy, where do I even begin? And then I actually remembered I do have tenure which as some people That means actually they can't say what I want to say But the truth is that I'm going to start on a serious note is that really Mike is just an awesome awesome Role model for all of us and he's a role model. I think from many many different perspectives and this is you know honest truth So first of course as we have seen throughout the day he has great vision and great technical skills So we all you know aspire to be to be Mike and this is not always easy. So I did try I did purchase a lot of red shirts but Finally what totally blocked me is I could never find shoes with high enough heels So I had to give up on trying to be Mike and instead maybe try to just be a little bit like Mike So if you think about it if Mike has a hundred startups, maybe the rest of us can you know have one startup If Mike has this never-ending stream of successful Systems, maybe the rest of us can build a few of these systems or maybe at least you know write papers that talk about these systems And if Mike can have an impact on the world, maybe the rest of us can try to have an impact on some you know At least some small community But that's not one that's not the only reason why Mike to me I think it's a great role model is that as we have seen today So you know I'm not lying is that he really truly cares about everyone around him So when Mike came to MIT I mean I knew he was famous because I'd heard of ingress before even though I was at MIT And we didn't talk about data races So he was super famous and I expected that as a famous person He would spend his time doing whatever famous people did which I didn't know what it was about clearly important stuff And instead Mike would always be available to read our write-ups and as Mike remembers at that time I would like write long write-ups and he would always read them Which was very surprising and he would always say things like this person is up for tenure So we need to all work hard and make sure that this person does whatever they need to do to get tenure This person is graduating and he kept talking about everyone on the team and really worrying about Making sure that everyone would have the most successful career possible and that was really inspiring The third thing is that he really cares about the database community And that really shows and actually was not in the database community and actually thanks to Mike I moved into the database community and one thing that I truly Love about our community And I think today's a good example is that it's just an awesome place with so many really nice people And I was thinking why is that and I think a big part of the reason is because Mike, David, Jim Gray When he was here and other people who are senior people in our community are just amazingly nice And that really sets the tone for for the rest of us and finally as you have seen just Mike never gets tired Something that I have not yet managed to accomplish, but maybe one day But of course you will say it's easy to say nice thing about someone in the abstract So let me give you a few concrete anecdotes of What it actually was like to work with Mike and in particular what we learned from Mike So as background, let me tell you what life was like before Mike showed up So I was here as a graduate students in systems working with a great guy Harry Balakrishnan Who was my advisor until I graduated and we were working on a lot of really cool stuff Many of you will recognize them Not that we contributed the most but because they were hot topics at that time So we're working on peer-to-peer how many of you have seen the peer-to-peer ring with all those things around the circle Right. Yeah, many of us. So we kept seeing those, you know, peer-to-peer rings all over. We were working with the sensors with Resource discovery with intentional naming sending messages around discovering devices online Etc. Etc. And there was even one part that was using kind of XML like semi structure things and we were all excited about it and then Well, then came Mike And it all changed especially I don't know how many of you know how Mike likes XML So that part of the project I was actually really proud of it and really happy and we were not sure with Harry where to Send this work to and I looked online as a student and I found this conference called SIG mod And I said this looks really great and Harry said let me talk to Mike And then Harry came back and said very gently, you know, Mike that is database people. They don't seem to really like this XML kind of stuff So that was That was the end of it. We did publish it somewhere else though But there was one part of the work that was really exciting as a shared Potential project where the sole sensor stuff and the streaming work that was going on at With the aura project so we started to work with stream processing in particular distributed stream processing So Harry and I were thinking publish subscribe messages peer-to-peer Distributed and then when we had a meeting with Mike It was a culture shock because when we raised, you know, the issue of distributed data management Mike would always talk about these employees in San Francisco and And he even cared about his employees in other countries that were actually apparently paid a net salary with lunch allowance Where are the American employees? And I thought gee database people really do care about employees But of course after all this laughing whenever I'm teaching in class and I have to talk about distributed databases Guess what example first comes to my mind? So that was one thing the other thing we learned from Mike very very important is that everything is best seen from a hundred thousand feet And actually this is great whenever I'm stressed about the project I look at it from a hundred thousand feet I look at the you know video of the universe and I'm thinking you know my problem is really not that big of a problem However, when I'm trying to debug some code, it's kind of hard at a hundred thousand feet The other great thing when Mike came and some people mentioned it is that we engaged in these collaborations with different people around the country in all these exotic locations and I was really excited I came from Montreal into the wild America and then here I go I was supposed to go on a business trip to Providence. I Was very excited. I still remember I came home and told my husband Michael on Thursday I'm going to go to Providence for you know meeting with these people from the Brown University And he's like Providence. Where is that and we looked looked it up on the map and said well, holy moly There's a whole state down there So that was very exciting We also got to go to Brandeis University I did not know existed and I discovered the main quality of Brandeis University so Mitch is here And he probably knows what's the most important quality of Brandeis that there's actually a lot of parking So whenever we had to have a meeting for the Aurora Borealis team We would most often meet at Brandeis because we could all park which we could not do at the Brown and we could Definitely not do at MIT and Finally kind of one of the really really important things we learned of course Is we learn all about quad charts, but because we were Mike's graduate student He told us the secret of a successful quad chart a secret that I'm going to now share with you And it goes as follows It works for all the papers if you want to write a paper. That's the way to do it and Finally something that actually came up today more often than than I expected is of course that Mike gives very very frank advice And I have a few of those quotes all of them are true quotes that he actually said in front of me So the first one is you know as a faculty if we do a project with a student and we don't get the results that we expected I will typically say this approach is not really working out, you know as well as we anticipated versus Mike just says Similarly when a student is giving a practice talk we say, you know, you have to engage with the audience You have to have presence. Maybe you should move around a little bit versus Mike says And finally, you know when let's say we're going to to do some work And we're going to give a demonstration We might come to a student and say look our group got a demonstration into Sigma and I know it's just a few weeks away But maybe we can add this new system We've been building and added to the demonstration and go to Sigma and actually show it off in the same demo booth You want versus Mike simply comes up to you and says Sigma this next week. You should just go and give a demo But I think kind of the last probably the most important thing That happened is Mike helped me graduate and this is a true story. It was it happened as follows So one day Mike came to my office and says Mike that you should graduate this year. I Thought oh good. This is good So I thought about this and I remembered that night I was working hard working late And I started to doubt that and I emailed Harry and I said Harry, you know I actually don't think I'm ready to graduate this year and Harry replied I think you are ready But if you are more comfortable you can stay one more year I'm supportive I will provide you an array etc etc and I replied to Harry Yeah, you know, I really think I would rather stay one more year and about ten minutes after I had sent this email to Harry I saw an email from Mike not address to me address to everybody else copying me saying Mike this graduating Where should she send her CD? But overall, thanks Mike We're almost done So I'm gonna keep my talk short A lot of you have talked about, you know, what's it like to write? Yeah, sorry. What's it like to work with Mike? Have meeting with him apparently he doesn't write any code But Maggie talked about what's it like to be a collaborating with him And I want to spend some time talking about what's it like to actually write papers with Mike And just so we're clear I officially I was Stan's anonymous student at Brown But Stan was always there. He's on my thesis committee and he helped me out with a lot of things Stan taught me about other aspects of life That beyond databases whereas before I talk about my time in grad school Before that I did what you would call as as Joe said a pre-doc With Marone Livny and University of Wisconsin on the Condor project And when I was there there's sort of right at the moment that DeWitt was going to leave for Microsoft and Raghu had already left for Yahoo research and so People at the time we were talking about in our group There was this legend of like Mike Stonebreaker and it was always described in the context being compared to David DeWitt, right so Mike Stonebreaker's projects ingress Postgres, Elusra, all these companies that he sort of formed out were much more successful than David DeWitt, right? The students that Mike Stonebreaker have were much more successful than David DeWitt students, right? Margo Seltzer, Mike Olsen, Jerry Heldt, all those guys And then it was also being described as being very very tall. DeWitt's a tall guy But people were describing Mike Stonebreaker as being even taller and there's other weird things that like things like that I don't have any comment on that So and so all right, this is kind of crazy, right? But you know it's sort of people kept on embellishing and get bigger and bigger and then When it was time to decide to go to grad school the last winter it was constant that I was there It was like negative 20 for like two weeks. I'm like I gotta get out of here And I decided to come to Rhode Island and New England and work with Stan or at Brown And I just so happened to be lucky to show up the right time when a store was getting started They're like, hey, we need grad students to work on this project And I was taking Stan's class at the time. He's like, are you Andy Pavlo? I said, yes He said, well, David DeWitt says I should talk to you. You should come work on a store with us and so we went Met up at MIT with much of the grad students as well and I met Mike for the first time and yes He was that impressive. He was very tall Um, but what was really shocking about it was how much of a pussycat He was he was kind of like this lumbering giant very friendly Not as all as intense the way that David DeWitt was, right? Totally opposite So, um I got a nine-year tenor clock you forget all this story. Um, all right, so There's been two people in my life, uh, that I've written papers with that, uh, Had to just really blow my mind about how incredible they are. Um Stan is very good, but stan actually didn't write too many like, you know, write paragraphs and things like that He would always sort of edit my work because he felt that I was you know Far and all as a writer that he didn't really need to like babysit me and do all these things So I've collaborated with a bunch of other people on papers Um, and the two that really stand out as being the most impressive was first was sam madden um Sam is like the the the tooth theory of paper writing, right? So like to say the paper sort of like a quarter done You put it underneath your pillow and then when you wake up sam has written the entire rest of the paper for you, right? And then of course the other person is mike stonebreaker, right? I don't know how mike does it at uh at this point in his life, but he just cranks out so much, uh So so much writing in it and but the key difference between sam and mike is When sam writes a bunch of uh, you know, bunch part of the paper for you It's almost perfect. It's gold, right? It's polished. It's wonderful You don't really need to edit that much Whereas with mike it's uh It needs a bit more work, right? So he knows how to cut through all the garbage and all the hyperbole and get to the point that you're really trying to get You know focus on in the paper and that he gets right and like I said He can write a lot a lot of paper a lot of material in a short amount of time Um, but mike olson sort of alluded to this earlier He's weirdly obsessed with this one word that appears non-stop through his papers, right? And that's the word hence It's good to know that like this isn't like an age thing apparently He's been doing this for years and years and years, right? So just to give you an example So this is a paper uh that mike and I were working on actually this summer Uh, we actually submitted it to scc where it was rejected or later submitted to something else. So this is uh Before my edits, this is sort of the first version the first draft that mike set around to the group said Hey, here you go. So now I just want to highlight where all the henses are, right? Uh, there's another example that I couldn't find where I'm pretty sure it might be the map reduce stuff where he used the word hence Three times in one paragraph, right? Which is uncanny, but Just to point out here. So like he's got it's on average. He's about two henses per pages Except for the second the last page. He only has one hence when he doubled down the last one He got it. He got that x1 and make up for it, right? So, uh, I'm not going to say much anymore about mike's writing abilities because he and I are still working on papers together And as david witt obviously pointed out I need to get tenure in nine years Um, so I'll say that I'm very very grateful to have worked with mike and my time here in grad school Like I was very unexpected uh to have a chance to work with man that this great caliber and this great uh experience and like I said the No matter whether you're a new grad student or whether you're you know, margo or mike or olsen or something like that He treats pretty much everyone the same, right? And I think that's really great. Um, and I really appreciate it. It was that so Now where I'm at basically since I've graduated uh, and I've moved to pittsburgh I still have a chance to work with mike, which is very great. Um, but the problem is um, he's a tall man both figuratively and physically and In the database community, he casts a wide shadow So I'm under a bit of a distress because I'm like, yes, I like working with mike But then again, I need to get tenure. So I sort of their branch out and do my own thing So that's I haven't figured out how to do that just yet, but that's that'll come down in the future So that's all I got to say about writing with mike. Okay. Um Next uh, so there was um When we were organizing this obviously, you know, mike mike has a lot of impact with a lot of people But they have not, you know, some people that are in europe Or some people in california and other places were not able to make it today So we sent out a call for participation to have people send in video clips of themselves, you know, wishing mike happy birthday and things like that So, um, I'm gonna show that now um And then we'll talk about the quiz results and then we'll have the open mike afterwards Hi mike. Happy birthday I feel really lucky to have had you as a mentor early in my career Um, happy birthday mike. Uh, really enjoyed working with you on both stream base and vertica Uh, you are an exceptional entrepreneur a brilliant technologist And a stubborn Shall we say steadfast visionary? Happy birthday I met mike stonebreaker at the high performance transaction processing workshop at a sylomore california in 2001 at the time I was first year assistant professor karen melvin And I was sitting with my laptop looking at Slides that I had trying to decide whether I should go up there and give a talk or not It was a gong show session the one that invites in from the talks and Mike sat next to me. We were drinking port wine In these evening sessions and next up next to me with the glass of port and We cut the talking and he said, um, you should you should go and give a talk Um, I mean I was already thinking a little bit about it The fact that mike said it made it a necessity So I started putting together the slides and at some point mike Watching over my shoulder took my computer and started changing the spice Putting the throwing the waste And moving things around and he gave me the computer racket said, okay. Now I'm going to give the talk I was overwhelmed. I will never forget it. I went up there and gave You know, I don't know if it was because of the port wine or it was because mike's stone breaker had just You know Refurbished my slides for me. I gave probably the best talk of my life at five minute little poster session Ever since mike has been a great mentor and a great very honest friend And thank you mike for everything. Happy birthday, mike It's a real pleasure to be sure. Happy birthday today in nearly 30 years since he first met And I think it was it was constant in terms of white food and you were asking me about sugars or lingers or what that's about and how those did actually increase Work was going to apply to it Looking back over those 30 years. It's just amazing to me the energy and leadership And just appreciates the actual and making problems of great technical interest practical importance Not to mention translating them into one startup after another Maybe another dynamite and inspiration like just to one of us, which are all of us. So happy birthday Enjoy it. Take care The mike barometer so in here if you're in a meeting with mike and you see him slowly Sliding down With the speaker or the topic or whatever when his head reaches about the top of the table Watch out. There's a storm coming because he'll get so bored. He'll say That's the stupidest idea I ever heard Happy birthday mike. Hi mike. This is donald from zurich I'm really sorry that I cannot be with you in person today Nevertheless, I would like to congratulate I hope that you're enjoying the big day or the big guy of big data I'm glad that you're taking the day off in order to celebrate rather than work Your competitors in industry and academia really appreciate Anyway, I wish you all the best And I'm looking forward to continue working with you on cider and all of these exciting opportunities in these great days Have a great day and bye Hi mike. Here's wishing you a belated happy birthday We've known each other for 39 years now since sigma 1975 when If I recall correctly, you were waiting for a tenure decision Um, and I was trying to finish your phd thesis Um, it was almost a rather short friendship When you nearly broke your neck riding Ed Laszowski's bicycle down a steep hill one summer Um, and you see Santa Cruz and we were both doing short courses There in the late 70s, but um, I guess your biking skills have improved since then Um, since you seem to do fine on a cross country bike trip With Beth many years many years later Um on a more serious note I'd like to thank you for all your effort to promote the importance of database management to the computer science community And for all your groundbreaking projects that continue to push us All in new and important directions. It's been a real pleasure and an honor knowing you And for both our sakes, I'm looking forward to another 39 years Of friendship so all my best happy 70th Oh, Mike stonebreaker Yeah, I've known Mike for years. He and I go way back together Mike used to come down from Berkeley to visit me in the summer of 1982 When I was recording at Westlake I remember that he would always wear the same red polo shirt every time I saw him I think he was on sales calls for an ingress or something back then This was when I was recording thriller and it really meant a lot to me that he would come and party with me And I think that Mike and I were under the same amount of stress back then Most people don't know this but Mike stonebreaker actually wrote most of the lyrics to beat it He was really angry at the time about Oracle or some guy named Larry And um, we couldn't give him writing credits or anything because Then that meant we would have to give royalties to the university And Mike said he didn't want them to get anything else from him Then I didn't seem like for a long time because he went back to Berkeley to build postgres and he got married or something You know how things get It's not like he was mad at me. You can't say that that's ignorant Some people ask me Why I went into academia when there's so many opportunities in industry and computer science What I tell people is that what I want most for my career Is to make impact and there are so many different opportunities that one can leverage in academia to make impact Make impact through your research through teaching through service to your university through advising graduate students And also if you consult on the side also protect transfer I think this sort of this view I have of making impact That in academia was really formed when I was a graduate student and spending time with Mike stonebreaker at MIT And so seeing Mike's tremendous impact on the entire database which we have community And also on many different universities in the northeast and of course also through the three companies he started while I was a PhD student and But I think however is sort of the most underrated about Mike impact that he's had I was actually the fourth dimension of impact that I mentioned before the uh is advising graduate students It's honestly Mike has had just a a tremendous amount of impact on me And just sort of thinking about uh the way the way I approach research the way I find problems to work on the way The way I sort of you know attack a problem and sort of find ways to solve a problem And really a lot of that comes from Mike stonebreaker What's great about Mike is that his advice that doesn't just stop With just research he also gives dating advice as well When I was when I was a student at MIT He told me that I needed to approach my dating life In the sort of exact same way that I approach Writing a sigmodo vldb vldb paper What he said was that I need to sort of apply the same scientific rigor The same focus and energy to my dating life as I as I do to writing papers And when I graduated and moved to Yale He told me that I wasn't going to find sort of girls to date in New Haven So he told me that he needed to invest the time and and money in an apartment in New York City And spent weekends there trying to find girls to date And indeed actually by the end of my first year in New York I I had found a girl today who ended up becoming my wife So to summarize Mike was sold both by personal and my professional fathers And without Mike, I'd probably be sad alone into many papers to parts Happy birthday Mike and thanks for everything Just to appear on stage But he never said anything about the video. So that's uh emissions that we're missing from this video Um, we we sent a lot of people messages and they they respond. Uh, there were some people I want to point out though Obviously who could not be included Um, uh, the first is obviously gene wong. Uh, he his health is Is, you know, it's been better. Uh, so he sends his birthday wishes and he couldn't it wasn't able to To send a video in for us. Um, we did also send a request to Larry Ellison through When I was out visiting stanford, I met with hector Hector serves on the board of directors at oracle and he got me in touch with Andy Mendelsohn And Andy Mendelsohn got in touch with Larry's personal assistant put a request in But we got a request we got a response just this week saying that larry would be unavailable And that's because he is gallivanting out with his Undetermined age girlfriend nikita con. Um, so don't take it personally mike. I don't I don't think it was you And then obviously if the last person is missing is uh, jim gray Because we know what happened with him. Uh, so this is was sent by jim gray's wife This is the last picture of mike and jim together In in 2006 Um, and he obviously if he as david witt said if he was still alive, he's still available He definitely would be here today to celebrate with us. So Okay Now we'll get to the quiz results Yeah, sorry. Yeah So first we're going to go through we're going to go through the the questions one by one And and we'll discuss what the answers are and why those are the answers So the first of all is how tall is mike? Does anyone take a guess? No That was not one of the options, but nice try Six I heard it's six seven. All right The answer is he is six foot six and I'll point out that this is actually the average height of an mba player Uh, I didn't put mba player in there, but that's that's what I meant, right? It's actually the average height is six point six nine Uh, but mike is ellsworth to play uh, because he is of that height. Okay next How many red polo shirts does mike own? And we'll take a guess at this Can you tell us how many shirts he has total? Very careful I asked beth the answer to this question and she said uh, I she only counted the polo shirts So there's all these other red shirts as well that aren't technically polo shirts And obviously he's wearing a red fleece right now. So these were not counted in it. All right, so the answer is nine Uh, I realized some of you said one Uh, and I thought that would be kind of rude to put that because that would imply that he does not shower bathe regularly, um But again, if you include all the other shirts red shirts that he has the numbers in the 20s Okay, what year did mike shape permanently shave off his mustache and any guesses? Okay, so the answer is 1978 uh, if you look at wikipedia This the moment in history when he actually shaved this off is one of the darkest points Uh in american history. We this is uh, this is one loss. We regret in the database community Okay, how many 4,000 uh foot mountains has mike climbed in the state of new hampshire I don't think exactly the answer, right? Yes, because the answer is 48 because that's all of them, right? So that's wonderful. Okay, perfect Okay, there are 4,000 players that don't fall within the rules of the 48 and they're adjacent peaks And he's done those too That's a technicality. Uh, if you put 48, we're gonna go with that you got it, right? Okay Final questions. How many questions how many companies has mike co-founded? Okay, well that is the answer nine. All right, and for the record. He did not have a failed tcby franchise. I I made that up Yeah, it was a success. Yes, uh, and of course here's the list ingress illustrious or hair stream based vertica Volpe db goby paradigm for a data tamer data tamer was the one that I think that threw people off Okay, um, so we have a first prize here Yeah, you want to set up The first prize is a handsome, uh, iphone music player thing generously donated by volt db and to Since we have extra stuff for people that maybe came in second place because we do have one winner Um, we have some vertica swag. Uh, that's not as nice as this But if you're welcome to have it if you like and so now my Wonderful first-year student, uh, thomas marshal here. It was that cmu with me who will be in the market in four years by the way He has actually put all of the Results from the contest that people selected the quiz Sit up here. Oh, we need a dongle in ingress right, so Andy made me learn quell for this, um, but uh, I'm a little new to it. So, uh, let's see if I can figure this out So the first thing that we want to see is how many people got each question correct so something like range of s scores, let's see retrieve Doot-doot-doot q1 All right, let's see All right, so looks like, um, pretty even across Um question two was notably, uh, worse I guess people don't know how many shirts he owns Um, but other than that, it was common knowledge. Um, let's also see, um, what the average score was So how do we do that in quell? Oh 1.63. It's not very good. Uh, I guess y'all don't know mike very well Um, and finally who was the winner? I'm pretty good at this, um, uh, so With a perfect five of five score Michael z and wins