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MIT professor Mike Stonebraker has been at the head of database technology for more than 50 years . The former Turing Award winner invented the Ingres and Postgres databases and facilitate launch a number of companies , including Streambase Systems ( learn by Tibco in 2013 ) , VoltDB , Tamr and SciDB . Now 80 , he knows a affair or two about database engineering science and establish fellowship .

His modish project , DBOS , puts the database at the center of the package stack , reducing the operating system to a modest kernel of humble - level functions . He consider that in the forward-looking information - centric world , Linux has n’t keep up with the scale and fastness require to sue ample total of datum in the swarm , so as he ’s done throughout his illustrious calling , he did the research and developed updated engineering science for modern data requirements , and of course , also found a company .

Today , DBOS formally launched with an $ 8.5 million seed investing .

Stonebraker , who is Centennial State - founding father and CTO at the company , says the inauguration is the culmination of a three - class joint research labor between Stanford and MIT ( just a petty bit of psyche power there ) . “ The genesis of the project was OLTP ( online transaction processing ) , database system of rules have gotten a lot quicker in the last 15 years . And so the thesis was that they would be competitory as a new operating arrangement stack , ” he told TechCrunch .

He became interested in adjudicate to put a database arrangement at the bottom of the technology push-down list as close to unornamented alloy as potential where the operating system usually sit . unfinished metallic element is a terminus used to describe the pure ironware layer where no package exists . Flipping the OS and the database is a bold and rotatory idea .

He says the company vision really follow together after he saw a talking by Databricks CTO Matei Zaharia , who would become a DBOS co - founder and advisor . Zaharia realized at Databricks that as the amount of information scale to previously unobserved peak , it required a new agency of thinking about the software stack . “ One matter we had discovered is , as we kept building services to support the database cloud at Databricks , and scale to millions of work load running at the same time , was that actually it was much well-fixed to make thing very database - centric , ” Zaharia explained .

That reinforce the idea that had been forming in Stonebraker ’s thinker , and he began wait at how to take labor that had been traditionally work in the OS with the C++ programming language , and run them in the database instead , using SQL queries . While operating systems folks were understandably threatened by this opinion , so far he has been able-bodied to make Indian file , scheduling and messaging systems in DBOS by running SQL interrogation . What ’s more , he ’s tested it at a major bank and a consumer food company . These are operations that are traditionally handled at the operate system degree .

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“ We proved it ’s public presentation competitive with whatever you ’re currently doing . So that gave us the courage to keep going , ” Stonebraker said . One of the cool matter about this coming is the ability to take advantage of database logging capability to keep a record of all the operating arrangement result for as long as you like .

“ So if a ransomware attack start 12 minutes ago , you just back up everything 13 minutes , a unmarried measure around the problem , and you ’re back up and move almost instantaneously . ” The data-based project became the company DBOS last year . The current production set includes three main pieces : an open source SDK where developer generate and test codification locally , before deploy to an auto - scaling serverless cloud . The fourth dimension change of location debugger — the power to move the OS back and away in time — also runs in the cloud service .

Stonebraker recognize that companies are n’t go to completely change the way they pass software program , so the inauguration is targeting more green field chance where companies being progress today could take reward of this newfangled approach to organizing software package . More established company could look at moving specific pieces or new project to DBOS , he pronounce .

While Stonebraker and Zaharia have substantial day jobs , induce it more challenging to run a ship’s company , it ’s certainly something that Stonebraker in particular has thick experience managing . He has hired a CEO to launch the day-by-day operations , and the company currently has a squad of eight engineers building the products .

The $ 8.5 million seed investment was was led by Engine Ventures with participation from Construct Capital , Sinewave and Gutbrain Ventures .