Gray developed techniques that allowed concurrent execution of many transactions, as well as restart after crashes, while maintaining the consistency of the database. He proved the correctness of the approach. This work was the foundation for his Turing Award.

James Nicholas Gray (1944 – declared dead in absentia 2012) was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation".

He received the Turing Award in 1998 “for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.” His work since 2002 focused on eScience: applying computers to solve data-intensive scientific problems.

Jan 28, 2007 · “Why Did Jim Gray Win the Turing Award?” by Michael Stonebraker introduces the properties of transactions and explains the importance of Gray’s work. “Jim Gray at IBM” by Bruce Lindsay provides more detail on transaction properties and the implementation techniques pioneered by Gray.

Jan 8, 2025 · James Nicholas Gray was an American computer scientist and winner of the 1998 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation.”

Gray's work led to the definition of the desired key transaction properties: atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability; and his locking and recovery work demonstrated how to build database systems that exhibit these properties.

In 1998, Jim was awarded the ACM’s prestigious A.M. Turing Award. Before joining Microsoft, Jim worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, Tandem Computers, IBM, and AT&T. He is the editor of The Performance Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems and co-author of Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques.

James Nicholas "Jim" Gray was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation." Check all the awards nominated and won by Jim Gray.

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

Jim Gray Microsoft Research 301 Howard St. SF, CA 94105, USA Abstract: Charles Babbage's vision of computing has largely been realized. We are on the verge of realizing Vannevar Bush's Memex. But, we are some distance from passing the Turing Test. These three visions and their associated problems have