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May 25, 1999

Two Phases Of Commitment Honored

Jim Gray, a researcher at Microsoft Research, the company's basic research division, was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery's prestigious A.M. Turing award last week at the ACM's annual awards dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Gray was a driving force behind Microsoft's TerraServer terabyte-sized database of satellite photos of virtually every place on earth, which is available over the Web. He was also involved in helping Microsoft demonstrate a SQL Server database performing 1 billion transactions a day at its Scalability Day event in May 1997.

However, Gray was given the award primarily because of work done two decades ago when he was a researcher at IBM, where he invented a key transaction-processing technology called the "two-phase commit." Today, the two-phase commit assures that virtually every transaction performed in the world, whether a cash machine withdrawal or an airline reservation booking, is correctly completed.

-- Stuart J. Johnston




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