 Alright, so next we're going to do, we're open up to a lot of clients here, how can you come down here and talk about your feelings about Mike? So we do have a list, Michael Brody, why don't you start us off? Do you need slides or are you good? Oh, no slides. You want to use this? I was told one minute. Okay. So, this is going to be a little emotional because Mike is, well, I hope maybe not, Andy got through it okay. Because Mike's had a huge influence on my personal life and my professional life. So, oh, you'll hold it. Okay, good. I first met Mike at Sick Fit at 1972, across the table from one night at dinner, across the table from Ted Cod, the night before the famous relational codosil debate, which younger kids probably don't know anything about. And Mike had just finished at Michigan and he was going off to Berkeley and he talked like the smartest man in the room and he was going off to change the world and he was and he did. That's supposed to be a laugh line. Alright, I'll give you further instructions as we go along. Okay, so, so Mike has been a close friend for a long time, so I wouldn't want to step over the line with any, you know, stories. Not because he defines a line as the thing you step over. So, let me go, let me try something here. This is a fundamental trait of Mike. He's a cheap bum. Or to be more polite, he's parsimonious. And everybody in this room and the economy has benefited from this. So, where does this come from? So, you know, Mike and I, this is something we share. It comes from something that he might call a zero billion dollar family. And so, what happens is, you know, when you learn something new, it sticks with you for your whole life. I mean, when you learn something when you're young, it sticks with you for a long time. It becomes an integral part of the way you live. The cheap bum thing is, you know all the optimizations that he's done with respect to his professional life. So, let me give you a personal one, and you weren't there. I was. Sunday night is the worst time of the week and the summer to go down from Wendepisaki to Boston. It's like a parking lot, 80 miles long. And so, we're progressing down, Mike's driving. And we're progressing down 93 at about five miles an hour. And, you know, we come to the message users board, you know where the liquor store is. And so, we start pulling into the liquor store, you know. We don't need wine, we just had some. They don't have beer. So, you know, it wasn't saying we don't talk a whole lot, you know. It's Mike, or me too perhaps. But so, we're pulling into the parking lot, going slower, slower, slower. Halfway through, we beat up like hell and we jumped right back into the traffic. We passed 400 cars in about three seconds. So, Mike's the kind of guy who sees an opportunity that other people don't see. Optimizes the hell out of it. You know, like column stores, anti-caching, liquor stores. So, another trait of Mike, many people have alluded to it. And it's about how smart he is and how fast he thinks. So, he doesn't believe this because I've tried it on him. The way I can imagine this is that in his mind over all these years, he's developed this computational model. So, it's in the wet where, it's in memory. So, he's got both a machine, architecture there, a whole bunch of applications, and data stores all over the place in there. And so, you ask him a question, and you know, the nanosecond it takes for him to answer. What he's doing is configuring the machine, choosing the apps, finding the data stores, and running them about a thousand jobs, looking at the graphs, and then he answers. So, he does that. So, next time you're sitting on his white couch upstairs talking to him, you know, you have to have a baseline. So, you just pose a question, you know, an average question about some complicated thing. And then, what you do is you change the parameters. So, you say, oh, you know how CPU and storage is free these days? So, here's a problem, you know, how would it go, blah, blah, blah. And then you say, well, what happens if network's free? How would you run it then? And he slows down for like three seconds doing this reconfiguring, trying to run the jobs over network being free. Anyway, that's another laugh line. Okay, so, Mike. Oh, you see, you see. Actually, I'm going to say something about that now. So, first of all, Mike, I admire you tremendously as a human being. Everything I know about you is admirable and a model to follow. I relish working with you. He busts my chops, as you just see. And they don't call him stone breaker for nothing. Another last three for three. And I love you as a friend. Some of the best times of my life have been on top of a mountain. We've done about 40 or so together just with the breeze and the trees and the fantastic view and maybe we do many more. So, I kind of heard something kind of the tail end here of Mike's career. My background was in astrophysics and supercomputing. I've been doing that since I was 19. And I lead the supercomputing activities for much of MIT. And we really hadn't heard of databases at all. I mean, and so I didn't really know anything about, you know, databases or never really heard of Mike. But there was this new thing called SIDB. And we were like, oh, we should find out more. And the guy who does it is Mike. And so I reached out to him and said, hey, you know, could we get together? And so I know nothing about Mike's personality at all. Just going in cold, walking into seasail like I do and sit down and talk to him. And I don't know if I have this correctly, but I think the first words he said to me is, you supercomputing guys have it all wrong. And I'm just like, all right, how's this going to go? And I had a choice, right? It was like the red pill or the blue pill at that point, you know? And I'm like, do I just be like, OK, I think. And I'm like, screw that. I'm like, Mike, you're all wrong. We do know what we're doing here in these parts. And then we had a really good discussion at that point. And I think that's sort of, now I know it wasn't just me. You know, that was reflective of your repertoire. We call that in our business weighing the brain, right? You come in front of them, they weigh the brain. Do I want to interact with this brain anymore? And then coming from astronomy, you know, I mean, so one thing we do have in astronomy is we have a really long history, you know? Just like, well, there's the whole like 10 billion years thing. And then there's like the 5,000 or 10,000 years of human study. So astronomers love making like lists of great discoveries. Like, you know, and it's a hard list to crack. You're like, Colomai, Newton, Einstein, and then, you know, we're going to add another person in 400 years. I mean, it's tough. And so when they rank discoveries, they often, you know, well, one of the big things they look at is, would that discovery have happened anyway? You know, like, eventually someone would have like, yeah, you know, it would have happened anyway. And so one of the greatest they talk about is general relativity. So everyone says, well, you know, special relativity was easy. You know, that was laying around. Someone would have, you know, it would happen to be Einstein. But general relativity, that was really mind blowing. That went to, we probably would have just been discovering that, you know, 50, 60 years later, if Einstein hadn't come along. And I can't speak to Mike's earlier accomplishments. But certainly, you know, our sense is something like PsyDB, which basically is going to be a revolution in science, you know, and I think it's going to have a huge impact on science for many decades to come. I don't know how it would have happened without Mike. And I don't know if it would have happened for another 40 or 50 years without Mike, because we really are in the wilderness, in the sciences with respect to databases. And maybe, so I'll leave with that. And so hopefully, you know, many years to come, you know, we'll be able to look back and really have a profound impact on science. So thank you very much. Next we have Marty Hurst. Hi, I'm Marty Hurst, and I'm speaking from the perspective of a former student who is now a full professor. And I actually wrote this in 1995 when Mike received the von Neumann Prize and I thought there was going to be a way to read it, but I couldn't go to the event at SIGMOD. And it's a good thing, because my memory since then is declined dramatically. And it reminded me of a lot of things that I wouldn't have remembered otherwise. So there were three people in my career that really made my career. Mike was the first, and by far, the tallest. He's truly a visionary. And I think by working with him, one learns that you can be a visionary too, because he teaches you how to be that, which is have bold ideas. And he not only led the way in the systems end of databases, but also in these other areas completely. So he was always trying to bring other fields into DBMSs, and I actually wanted to study AI, and he convinced me to work in this area with him. So he tried to get AI and databases to work together, maybe not the most successful part of the efforts, but he made the bold that led to the trigger systems that wasn't expert systems, but it led to a whole industry. He led early efforts to bring economic methods into DBMSs, and he was a pioneer in the area of user interfaces and databases. And I remember him lamenting around 1993 when he couldn't get UI work published in the database community, and when Tiogo was spurned. That work eventually led to the Informix visualization interface, and then Oracle had hundreds and hundreds of people doing InfoViz by 1995. So not only is Mike a visionary, but he's also inspirational to those around him, as many people have pointed out. Back around 1989, when I was a graduate student who didn't find databases interesting enough and instead wanted to do natural language processing, and we had talked about this before I came to Berkeley, and Mike had said, you know, come for a couple of years if you don't like that switch. So Mike said to me, if you're going to work with text, think big text. And nobody was doing statistics over text at that time. One little group at IBM, that was it. So I took this on as a challenge, despite the really strange looks I got from all of my colleagues in NLP, and as a result was one of the very first people to do computational linguistics work on large corpora, which is now, you know, being revived even more than before. So that approach, you know, dominates the field. Also, in 1989, you know, there was no internet, I'm sorry, there was no web, and it was really, really difficult to get text collections. I mean, there weren't any text collections lying around. And Mike, I still remember, you went personally with me to a little room in Doe Library, to where there's a computer terminal where we downloaded Sacramento Bee articles, and you had to pay $200 to get those, so I'd have a text collection. I mean, that's how hard it was. And I remember you went with me, which was really extraordinary. I first met Mike when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, and I needed a topic to have an undergraduate honors thesis. And I just wandered into a seminar, kind of out of the blue, and the seminar was on next generation databases. And Mike just immediately said, okay, here's a project, work on it. And he just assumed that I was good. And that was the first experience I'd ever had of that at UC Berkeley from a computer science professor. And I'm not joking. That's not a joke. The assumption was I was good. I never encountered that. And that is sort of a larger theme that people have only touched on, but no one has said really explicitly, here, I don't think yet. But as further evidence of this, when I wrote this in 2005, in terms of the number of female PhD students who advised and graduated from the UC Berkeley CS department, in 1995, Mike was tied for first with eight. And if I had stayed with him for my PhD, he would have been first at that time. And I don't think this is because Mike had an explicit desire to graduate people of different stripes. He just saw everyone the same and treated everyone the same. And I say that as a result, and it's not just students, also staff members, people that really would otherwise have been sort of neglected. Mike elevated. He's really great at elevating people and others have touched on that. So Mike's enormous generosity is reflected in other ways. Others people have alluded to this. I wrote a little bit of code. It went into Postgres. And when Elastor was going to go public, I was already off at my next job at Park but then I got this email from Polyokey and Allison and Paul couldn't be here but they sent their wishes saying, oh, you know, you wrote this code. I just found it. And they're about to IPO. They're about to do the IPO. And I found that you and a few other people wrote some code. So we want to get your shares in this company. But the lawyers had already done all the paperwork. And Mike made them stop and read you the paperwork so that the rest of us could get some shares in this company, which I didn't even know he was doing. So it's really generous. And I guess he's continued that tradition of generosity. So that's Mike Stonebreaker in a nutshell. Visionary, inspirational, egalitarian and generous. But sure you're thinking, hey, that can't be the whole story, right? So it wasn't any kind of scary as a research advisor and people have touched on this. The answer is yes. He was kind of scary as a research advisor. So I still remember the time when I was waffling around. I'd already switched to the other advisor to do NLP but I was kind of floundering, unable to find a thesis topic. And so I made an appointment to talk with Mike. And even though he wasn't my advisor, he made a meeting with me and we met on a Saturday for some reason and it was pouring rain. And I still remember him appearing and looking down at me from his enormous height and he seems a lot taller when he's your research advisor and he seems tall even if he's not. And basically saying something like, what's wrong with you? Just pick a topic and do it. And I have to say that from that day on I was just fine and I had no problems whatsoever doing research. And maybe it's the come to Jesus, I call it the kick in the pants speech. And sometimes not always I have the guts to do that with students if I feel like they can take it, although it's harder today than I think it was then. But it really made the difference. Sometimes you just need somebody to say that to you. So as others probably mentioned, Mike is a man of very few words. This made it easy to tell when you've done something really, truly great. Those of you who have worked with him know at least at that time maybe it's changed but there was one treasured response you could get from Mike. He doesn't get really enthusiastic about a lot of stuff but if you have a really good idea he would say this. So I'd like to say to Mike on the occasion of your 70th birthday and all of your words and all of your accomplishments, neat. So now we are going to get into family members. So first we're going to have Dave Sturmbaker come and talk about Mike. I might say I somehow think that it speaks to Mike's inclusiveness that security would even let an English teacher into the room. I'd like to ask you to imagine, try somehow to go back with me, 60 years. Just about 60 years. And my topic is playing Monopoly with Michael. Nearly 60 years ago, brothers playing that timeless game of risk and reward at a summer farm in southern Maine. Brothers fighting boredom instead of each other. Brothers learning self-sufficiency and good luck through the role of the die and the exchange of funds. Michael was always the banker. Can there be any doubt to that? And I was the younger brother who impulsively would buy whatever the first thing was that was available. And so I gravitated naturally to those light blue places. Vermont, Connecticut Avenue. I would have wished for New Hampshire as well as Main Street for even then my rural affinities were already established. But for Michael perhaps the game had a different appeal. Well I had to work hard to count out the spaces of a double role and lived in dire fear to avoid jail. He was likely already aware of that. Statistically, Illinois Avenue was the place card most likely to be landed upon. That railroads were potentially lucrative but the short line, like its name, was the least profitable of all. He had likely surmised by cost-benefit analysis that construction of three houses and not a grand hotel would lead to maximum profitability in the shortest period of time. Yes, it's a game. And I even discovered that you can research online the strategies for doing well at it. Probably Mike wrote that too. But it's game token for any aficionados of Monopoly and the fan in the group here. I don't remember exactly, but I'd like to think that for Mike it was always the open top race car in keeping with his loves of Corvettes and all things fast. Our games at the summer farm lasted for hours, days even. We didn't play by the real rules, and always it seemed that my impulsiveness and whimsical approach to decision-making would lead me inexorably to the brink of bankruptcy. And then typically, Michael quietly surveying the board, fingering his deed cards, deep in thought, might offer me a timely loan or IOU to delay the inevitable, but more likely, on those occasions, he would propose a more creative partnership or a novel deal with the prospect of future return. Innocent that I was. I welcomed his support simply for another cycle of the board with positive cash flow and dreamed of unexpected windfalls at free parking. For me, then, kids, Michael sustained the game, combining and recombining his interests, diversifying his holdings while I explored in a most childlike way mergers and acquisitions, return on investment, venture capital, partnerships, corporate strategies, all the things that you've been hearing today. And ultimately, Michael always seemed to collect those deep green and blue place cards like Pacific Avenue, Park Place, and inevitably too, it seemed he won. And our games were ended, and we brothers scattered to school and college, graduate studies, and life's callings. But today, in the midst of all this festrift celebration, it gives me great pleasure to recall the simplicity of those early games of playing monopoly with Michael and the life lessons he taught. It seems, as you've listened to all today, that Michael has amassed quite the metaphoric collection of place cards through the years. Nassau Street, Beale Street in Princeton or Ann Arbor, Hurst Street in Berkeley, and more recently, Vassar Street, as he's pursued the career and life journey that we celebrate today. And all along the way, there have been so, so many, beginning with me, I suppose, whom he has supported with thought, with mentoring, and with his rather visionary way of seeing the entire board, whether in monopoly or in life. So thank you, brother, for the opportunity to share in this day's celebration. It's very special to pay tribute to you, my older brother. Well done. Okay, now we have the women stonebreakers coming up, all three of them, Sandy, Leslie, and Beth. No, no, no. I'm sorry. We don't have a fancy PowerPoint presentation. We didn't get that memo. I'm blaming you. I said it twice. No, no. There have been a really, there have been a lot of really knowledgeable people up here speaking today, saying a lot of really knowledgeable stuff, almost none of which I actually understood. You might have seen me stifling a few yawns. This is a problem I often run into when it comes to my dad. I've always known that he's really good at what he does, but even after 22 years of living with him, I'm still not quite sure what that is. When I first met Michael, I immediately thought he was intriguing. After getting to know him a little better, I realized how intimidating he was. But after almost 30 years of marriage, I've also come to see the gentle, kind, and quirky man beneath that scary exterior. And that's the guy we want to talk about today. Sorry, we're really nervous, so we wrote out all the words. So, in advance, Dad, we ask for your forgiveness for this. Here are 10 things the rest of you may not have known about Michael Stoenberger from those of us who love him best. Number one, my dad is the smartest person I know. But one thing you need to know about him is that he actually stinks at technology. He once put a DVD into our CD player and then questioned why it wasn't playing on the television. Beyond that, he has a really hard time figuring out our remote. Although I got to give him credit, he's trying really hard. He's working on that one. And then he's even butt-dialed me on an iPhone. And if those of you don't know, it's a pretty sophisticated piece of technology. You actually have to swipe before you can even call someone. So it's pretty impressive that he's butt-called me. Stay close to the mic. Okay, okay, okay. So number two, one thing early on that brought together this pretty diverse family was the TV show Desperate Housewives. I can't remember who chose it and I don't totally understand why it happened, but we all stopped what we were doing every single Sunday night in 2004 to watch the drama on Wisteria Lane play out. To this day, it remains one of the very, very few TV shows. He's even yawning now. That my dad would sit through without trying to check his email or fidgeting or complaining about how it wasn't very funny or dramatic. Number three, Mike has no ability to multitask. He's so focused and if he's on the phone and you want to pass him a message, he totally will turn the other way and ignore you. If he's playing hearts on his iPhone, don't even try to talk to him. So when Leslie was a baby and I was away for a week on a business trip, I came home and the house was a gigantic mess. So I asked Mike what he'd been doing all week and he said, I held the baby. I guess that was apparently what he did with 100% of his time. Number four, I don't have a lot of memories of the days of my dad at UC Berkeley. It was great to sort of hear about the West Coast era. But I vividly remember a class my dad taught here at MIT, not because I ever went to a lecture, but because he used finding my college email address as an example of a search query. So without any context at all, I was suddenly inundated with emails from MIT students telling me and I swear, I quote, gee, your dad sure is good at databases. So of course I called him up to see what was going on and his first reaction, which it turns out is not so unique, was to suggest I find out if any of them wanted to go on a date with me. Number five, when I went to college, I was pretty excited but also really nervous about making new friends and meeting my professors. And when I walked into my freshman year seminar, he immediately said, oh my gosh, is your dad Michael Stonebreaker? And then he started to ask me a bunch of questions about his research and all of it sounded like Greek to me because pretty much that's what it's been today. All of you have sounded like Greek to me. And I think he was probably more excited to meet my dad than he was excited to meet me. And I think over parents weekend, this professor was actually happier to see my dad than I was. It's a funny thing to have a parent who is really, really famous in a really small group. Number six, I don't know about you guys, but the one type of music I really can't stand is Bluegrass. So as you know, Mike loves the banjo and the louder and the twangier the better. We have to negotiate when he's allowed to practice now that we're in a condo in the city. And even when he's practicing behind every closed door between him and me, I can still hear it at the other end of the house. But I am amazed at his persistent and working on a skill that doesn't come easily to him. Number seven, the first and only insult my dad ever taught me, I don't know if you remember this, is squatty body, which is to be said in derision to the vertically challenged out there. I was quite young and I thought this was the most amazing thing. And so when the third graders who aren't really the most creative or smart bunch called me Eiffel Tower, I would shoot back squatty body and they would not care. Even so, my dad taught me to always stand tall and be proud of myself from my height to my accomplishments. It was the best lesson in self-confidence that I could have received, that there was nothing wrong with being over six feet and if anyone has a problem with it, they're just a squatty body. Number eight, when it came to school my dad was my number one helper. In elementary school he built a ramp so I could determine which ketchup was the thickest for a science experiment. Then in middle school he helped me collect bugs for one project and went out in the dead of winter we both bundled up to find animal tracks and poop for another project. In high school he helped me build a DC motor and a mousetrap car. I'm pretty sure I would have probably failed physics had it not been for his patience in helping me with my homework. Because of my dad's support I know that I can tackle any problem no matter how big or how small or how much calculus is involved and he'll always have my back. Number nine, one of Mike's favorite things is when the going gets tough the tough gets going. For some people that could just be a cliche but one of the things I love about Mike is that when the things get tough for other people he's always there. He's helped out family members and friends and always goes above and beyond for causes he believes in. Number ten, you probably noticed the shirts we're wearing. For our last fact we will confirm that yes this is my dad's face done up as an Andy Warhol portrait. And yes, we were not here at whatever event this was. He gave us these shirts because he genuinely thought we'd like them and wear them. I'm dead serious, that's why he brought them home for me. And the thing is I genuinely do like it. Especially when an event like this gives me the perfect venue to wear it and add another one to the collection. So Mike, we love you and we're so proud of everything you've accomplished even if you can't figure out the remote. So now before we allow Mike to respond we have a quick message from Andy Palmer. I was going to do this earlier but then Andy and Dave made me hold off until the end. I think there's some fear involved but on behalf of DataTamer our latest project together and my wife Amy and I we wanted to give you something your name's Stonebreaker, right? So, you know, I've never seen you break a stone but I'd like to. So Mike, please accept this on behalf of all of us. Thank you. So real quick. That's a really bad idea. You break stones with it. Does anybody have any final words before we allow Mike to speak? Yes, please. Oh, sorry, yes, you. Hi everyone, most of you don't know me. My name is Daniela Rus. I make robots and I'm also director of C-Sale. And Mike, I would like to tell you on behalf of all of us at C-Sale that we so appreciate having you with us and I especially have learned so much from you in the last two years that I've been director. Thank you for your help with big data. Thank you for teaching me about entrepreneurship and inspiring us to start our entrepreneurship program. Now I've had so much fun today listening to all of you who I don't know. I'm clearly missing something out so I'm going to try to write the database paper in the future so I could hang out with you. And I just want to say that as a testimony of how much Mike is loved at MIT I want to tell you that today is parents weekend and at some point Daniela can C-Sale headquarters do anything to to make this room available for us because the campus is full of parents and kids and all the auditoriums are full of parents and kids. And so we tried, we tried and we couldn't so I said to Sam sorry we have to pick a different weekend. But the people around Mike pulled magic, the magic that we couldn't pull so here we are all together. So Mike, everyone around you loves you. Happy birthday. We look forward to 70 more years of you. So I wanted to kind of clear up this a little bit too industrial picture some people are saying alright you're working with Mike or you're doing research but sometimes there are too many useful companies that Mike created so I wanted to clear up a little bit this industrial picture by giving the following example so we had we had a lot of industrial collaborators and basically one day we met at one of the companies, great companies here in Cambridge basically trying to get a lot of data from them for free. And basically I came to the meeting there were many important people there like CEO, CTO many key technical people and I had a paper in my hand that I actually just finished fixing up after Mike was comments. So and here he basically asked what it is I said the paper that we basically need to submit and what do you think was the question so the question was when is the deadline and the answer was that one is today and what he did is he took the paper and basically started editing it right in the meeting so and thank you very much for doing that because we have our paper accepted there are more than 200 downloads already so that's to answer the people who are saying that Mike was too industrial that's not true and the second the second example I wanted to kind of give is that many people who cannot join this event today express concerns that they cannot join but still want to basically be able to congratulate Mike and things like that so we decided to put up a small database on where they can enter their wishes nothing gets lost and there are many wishes already like more than 200 and I was thinking to print them out but no I'm not going to do it this is too unstructured alright so do you think I should have printed them out put them in X mouth so no you should I mean select your bird wishes from database right so that's what database people do and I think here is the backup alright so congratulations alright that's it thank you very much I'm Marilyn and I have the privilege of working with Mike on his eighth company and one of the things I'm surprised about here is that nobody's used the word parallel entrepreneur it's the way that I always introduce Mike and all of you here who have built companies know what a ridiculous fucking roller coaster it is when you build a company and Mike's the stable guy there that says you know this is really good it's going to be okay we're going to make it through it but the interesting thing is how many people you know in the entrepreneur community have three startups going at once and how many people have an academic career on top of three startups and the Intel Science and Technology Center and sometimes it you know when I'm sitting there doing my you know hundred emails or whatever day it is I and I start to feel sorry for myself I'm like totally blown away thinking about how many emails Mike's processing every single day and yes I was at a meeting where Mike was editing somebody's paper because it was also do the night before and as someone who's new to the database community just you know as I did this company Paradigm 4 and PsyDB with Mike it's been marvelous to be part and see that we're part of a much longer tradition I thought that zero billion dollar industry was something that Mike just started talking about when we built PsyDB and I find out that look here are all these words that have a long pedigree and a long tradition with them so Mike thank you it's just such a privilege and a gift to be able to do this with you and I wanted to end by saying you know last week we got a call from the office of technology at BP and this stuff happens all the time but what was really funny the guy gets on the phone with me and he says you know we're going to have the CTO and we're going to have seven vice presidents there and he says when Mike Stonebreaker talks BP listens but you know this is also the pleasure and privilege of working with Mike is doors open people listen it's wonderful to work with you and thank you