Jim Gray's Wisdom

Here are some notes when i was reading the special issue of SIGMOD record for Jim Gray in June, 2008.

• "I am sort of interested in everything."
• "If you're in hurry to get out, you do a theoretical thesis"  --Jim's reason for doing a theoretical thesis.
  
• "One of the things that my research advisor Mike Harrison taught me to do is to write things down....One consequence of this is that I wrote lots of papers....One consequence of that is that i got to be very famous for the work of a lot of other people which is not fair."
• Performance is not an issue any more. Simplicity is a big issue."
• "If you take the road view of the focus of SIGMOD, the ni think actually databases are a growing field. If you take a narrow view, it is dying." --Jim's comment on the difference of MOD( management of data) and MOI( management of information).
• "I always tried to be in a situation where iI could quit the job I was doing that very day if the need came. I think that was liberating."
• "The world needs a couple of lunatics and it needs a lot of solid research. You can either try to be Pasteur and do really innovative experiments or you can be one of the not so well-known scientists who came after Pasteur and built on this work."
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• "The original B-tree paper was bounced; the data cube paper was bounced. The transaction paper that we sent in was bounced. Any paper that is non-linear is going to get bounced" --Jim comments on paper rejection. Quite an encourage to me, ha!

When i read about all these stories about Jim, the most i am impressed was not his achievement but his personality reflected by the numerous small touching stories offered by his colleagues, students, friends....