Michael Stonebraker researched relational databases, or RDBMS,' at UC, Berkeley in the early 1970s but now with a new product he has more to offer.
Ingres and Postgres technology is the foundation for many leading relational databases such as SQL Server, Sybase Inc.'s Adaptive Server Enterprise, Ingres Corp.'s product, IBM's Informix, among others.
The new product is column-oriented databases which just happens to be built by Stonebraker's latest start-up, Vertica Systems Inc. which store data vertically in table columns rather than in successive rows.
Maybe he has a vested interest in the adoption of the new column-oriented databases.