Jim Gray’s vision of flash-based storage anchors this issue’s theme.

A Pioneer’s Flash of Insight BRYAN CANTRILL, SUN MICROSYSTEMS

In the May/June issue of Queue, Eric Allman wrote a tribute to Jim Gray, mentioning that Queue would be running some of Jim’s best works in the months to come. I’m embarrassed to confess that when this idea was first discussed, I assumed these papers would consist largely of Jim’s seminal work on databases—showing only that I (unlike everyone else on the Queue editorial board) never knew Jim. In an attempt to learn more about both his work and Jim himself, I attended the tribute held for him at UC Berkeley in May.

I came away impressed not only that Jim was a big, adventurous thinker, but also that he was one who remained moored to reality. This delicate balance pervades his life’s work: The IBM System R folks talked about how in a year he not only wrote nine papers, but also cut 10,000 lines of code. Database researchers from the University of Wisconsin described how Jim, who had pioneered so much in transaction processing, also pioneered the database benchmarks, developing the precursor for what would become the Transaction Processing Council in a classic Datamation paper. His Tandem colleagues talked about how he reached beyond research and development to engage with the field and with customers to figure out (and publish!) why systems actually failed—which was quite a reach for a company that famously dubbed every product “NonStop”! And Jim’s Microsoft coworkers talked about his driving vision to put on the Web a large database that people would actually use, leading him to develop TerraServer, and his ability to inspire and assist subsequent projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Microsoft Research’s World Wide Telescope—systems that solved hard, abstract problems and delivered appreciable concrete results.

Given that Jim insisted on designing and implementing actual systems in the present while also focusing on big, future-looking ideas, it is no surprise that he and Queue had a natural affinity for one another. While listening to the presentations at Jim’s tribute, I began asking myself a question that I imagine was also occurring to others: if Jim were here and if I could have but one conversation with him, what would it be about? For me, the answer was clear: I would want to talk with him about the coming revolution in flash-based storage, the focus of this month’s issue of Queue. This has been an exciting issue to put together, because as Adam Leventhal’s article, “Flash Storage Today,” discusses, the economics of flash have promoted it from sideshow to main event: flash is growing from mere curiosity to a new tier in the storage hierarchy—perhaps the first such tier since the introduction of the IBM RAMAC in 1956!