IV · Data & databases

Pat Helland

1956–

AWS · ex-Microsoft · ex-Salesforce

Gave us

Decades of architecture papers — "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions", "Immutability Changes Everything", "Identity by Any Other Name". The thinker behind a generation of distributed-database designs.

The story

Worked on Tandem, then SQL Server, then BigTable-era Google, then Salesforce, now AWS. Each paper is short, sharp, and quotable. His "Memories, Guesses, and Apologies" piece is the canonical framework for thinking about eventual consistency.

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Michael Stonebraker MIT · creator of Ingres, Postgres, Vertica, VoltDB · 2014 Turing laureate Jim Gray Microsoft Research · ex-Tandem · 1998 Turing laureate Rudolf Bayer TU München emeritus · Boeing Research Martin Kleppmann University of Cambridge · author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Across the field

V Grace Hopper US Navy Rear Admiral · creator of the first compiler V Barbara Liskov MIT · 2008 Turing laureate V Dan Luu Independent · ex-MS · ex-Centaur · prolific essayist V Joe Armstrong Ericsson · co-creator of Erlang V Ada Lovelace Mathematician · the first programmer VI Eric Brewer UC Berkeley · ex-Google VP · CAP theorem VI Pat Helland Tandem · Microsoft · Amazon · Salesforce VI Werner Vogels CTO of Amazon · Dynamo paper

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