He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB, and served as chief technical officer of Informix.

"[7] Stonebraker's career can be broadly divided into two phases: his time at University of California, Berkeley when he focused on relational database management systems such as Ingres and Postgres, and, starting in 2001, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he developed more novel data management techniques such as C-Store, H-Store, SciDB and DBOS.

[14] Stonebraker joined University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor in 1971, and taught in the computer science department for twenty-nine years.

[citation needed] By the early 1980s, however, the performance and capabilities of these low-end machines were seriously threatening IBM's mainframe market, and with the threat came the ability of Ingres to become a viable, "real" product for a large number of applications.

[citation needed] These included Stonebraker, who with fellow Berkeley professors Larry Rowe and Eugene Wong helped found Relational Technology, Inc., later called Ingres Corporation.

The new project was named POSTGRES (POST inGRES),[19] and was designed to add support for complex data types to database systems and improve end-to-end performance of data-intensive applications.

Postgres was extensible in a number of other ways, making it easy for programmers to modify or add to the optimizer, query language, runtime, and indexing frameworks.

[citation needed] Postgres was also offered using a BSD-like license, and the code forms the basis of the free software, PostgreSQL.

These economic policies allowed traditional ideas in query optimization to be carried out over competing sites, and also served as the basis for data storage, replication and movement within a federation.

Cohera's initial mission was to commercialize Mariposa, but eventually focused on a business-to-business catalog management application on the core federated data integration engine.

[citation needed] Stonebraker became an adjunct professor at MIT in 2001, where he began another series of research projects and founded a number of companies.

In the C-Store project, started in 2005, Stonebraker, along with colleagues from Brandeis, Brown, MIT, and University of Massachusetts Boston, developed a parallel, shared-nothing column-oriented DBMS for data warehousing.

In 2009, Stonebraker co-founded Goby,[24] a local search company based on ideas from Morpheus, for people to explore new things to do in free time.