Originally posted here: http://sqljunkies.com/weblog/donnymack/posts/382.aspx
The guy is just brilliant so I had to spread the knowledge
Great Presentations on many different cutting edge topics::http://research.microsoft.com/users/gray/jimgraytalks.htm
BIO
Jim Gray is a "Distinguished Engineer" in
Microsoft's Scaleable Servers Research Group
and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC).
Jim's primary research interests are in databases and transaction processing systems. His current work focuses on building supercomputers with commodity components, thereby reducing the cost of storage, processing, and networking by factors of 10x to 1000x over low-volume solutions. This includes work on building fast networks, on building huge web servers with CyberBricks, and building very inexpensive and very high-performance storage servers.
Jim also is working with the astronomy community to build the world-wide telescope . When all the world's astronomy data is on the Internet and is accessible as a single distributed database, the Internet will be the world's best telescope. This is part of the larger agenda of getting all information online and easily accessible (digital libraries, digital government, online science, ...).