Databases Meet Astronomy: Jim Gray's 2001 MIT Lecture
By 2001 Jim Gray had already won the Turing Award for transaction processing. Butler Lampson’s introduction describes TP as “pixie dust”: sprinkle it on a boring, non-fault-tolerant program and it becomes fault-tolerant and load-balanced. Gray then spends an hour on a different subject, astronomy. Working with Alex Szalay’s group at Johns Hopkins and with Caltech, he had been loading the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) into SQL Server, and this lecture is an early report on that project, the SkyServer....