I have spent 45 years innovating in the area of very high performance database systems. Many of the techniques used by today's big data solutions were first pioneered as part of the Gamma parallel database machine project that I ran in at the University of Wisconsin in the mid-1980s. This work received the ACM Software Systems award, ACM's most prestigious award after the Turing Award, in 2008. I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007. In 1995 I received the ACM SIGMOD Ted Code Innovations Award and was also selected to be an ACM Fellow.