Editors' update, June 6, 2007 – Dr. Jim Gray was reported missing at sea off the coast of California on Jan. 28, 2007. An extensive search by the U.S. Coast Guard, his family and friends found no trace of him. Additional information is available on the Microsoft Research web site.

Dr. James N. Gray was a Technical Fellow at Microsoft Corporation. A specialist in database and transaction processing computer systems, his research focused on applying computers to solve data-intensive scientific problems. He had a long-standing interest in scaleable computing, building super-servers and work-group systems from commodity software and hardware.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Gray worked at Digital, Tandem, IBM and AT&T on database and transaction processing systems including Rdb, ACMS, NonStop SQL, Pathway, System R, SQL/DS, DB2, and IMS-Fast Path. He was editor of the Performance Handbook for Database and Transaction Processing Systems, and co-author of Transaction Processing Concepts and Techniques.

Gray held doctorates from the University of California at Berkeley and honorary doctorates from Stuttgart and Paris, was a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Science, and the National Academy of Science, a Fellow of the ACM, and Editor of the Morgan Kaufmann series on Data Management.