Jim Gray Is Missing

K-Man writes "Jim Gray, Turing Award winner and developer of many fundamental database technologies, was reported missing at sea after a short solo sailing trip to the Farallon Islands off San Francisco. Gray is manager of Microsoft's eScience group. The Coast Guard is searching for his vessel over 4,000 square miles of ocean, and there have been no distress calls or signals of any kind. Gray is 63 and a sailor with 10 years' experience."

Comments

Mirror of SFGate News

[mfh]

SFGate's Report - Mirrored:

(01-29) 15:23 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- The U.S. Coast Guard is looking for a San Francisco computer scientist who may be lost at sea after he failed to return from an outing to the Farallon Islands Sunday afternoon.

Jim Gray, 63, set out alone on his 40-foot sailboat, "Tenacious," Sunday morning and was expected back sometime that afternoon, officials said.

Gray is a prize-winning researcher and the manager of the Microsoft Science Group in downtown San Francisco.

His wife notified authorities at 8:35 p.m. Sunday after Gray failed to return and did not answer cell phone calls, the Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard searched all night with an aircraft, helicopter, coastal patrol boat and motor life boat, officials said, but found no sign of the missing vessel. They also found no signs of distress.

Officials said that Gray has more than 10 years of sailing experience and that his boat is "well-equipped with communication, safety and emergency gear."

The Farallon Islands are about 27 miles off the coast from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Re:Mirror of SFGate News

[Anonymous Coward]

Additional info about his Turing Award.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1999/0 5-14turing.mspx

The plot thickens!

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Jim Gray, Turing Award winner and developer of many fundamental database technologies ...

Isn't reiserfs organized sort of like a database?

I know what happened....

[Anonymous Coward]

he accidently did a Cartesian Join, and flooded the boat

Re:I know what happened....

[Bob of Dole]

A Cartesian join gives you every possible combination of two (or more) tables of information you give it. It's very easy to do in SQL (the primary database query language) because of how the syntax works, and it's very rarely what you actually want.

An example would be if you have an address book, listing about 50 people you know, with names and addresses (But no phone numbers)
You also have a phone book, with names and phone numbers of everyone in your city. Let's say 1 million people.

Let's say you've got an address ("12 Pear Tree"), and you want a phone number. To find this information you've got to use the address book to locate the name of the person living at that address, then look up that name in the phone book.
In SQL, you'd do that search like this:

select phone_number from phone_book,address_book where address_book.address="12 Pear Tree" and phone_book.name=address_book.name

It's saying "Find every address entry where the address is "12 pear tree", and out of all the possible combinations of address book entry and phone book entry, just give me the ones where the names match."
That'll give you the result you want. However, it's that last bit of SQL that's easy to forget, the "phone_book.name=address_book.name" bit. Without it, you're doing a Cartesian join. The database says "Ahh, they must want every combination of these two tables".
So instead of getting one result, you'll get one million results. The address has to be "12 pear tree", but the database is free to match that up with EVERY entry in the phone book, and it will.

That's what the grandparent post was referring to. SQL just makes that mistake very easy to make, and you'll end up with a GIANT pile of results flying at you if you make it.

Re:You don't think

[Anonymous Coward]

All Hans on deck...

Hm...

[Cyberax]

> SELECT loc FROM Locations loc, People p WHERE p.name="Jim Gray" AND p.loc=loc.id

The query returned 0 results.

Re:Hm...

[tedivm]

He probably drowned himself when he realized that the majority of the world learned SQL from a tee shirt, and just like the shirt [http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/595d/], you forgot the semi-colon.

Re:Hm...

[Cyberax]

Actually, my development environment does not require semicolons after lone SQL statements. Besides, when you embed SQL statements in code using JDBC/DBI/... you also don't need semicolons.

And I don't like semicolons because one time I accidentally typed "DELETE FROM Table; WHERE ..." on a production database. Luckily, one entry had a constraint which forced transaction to rollback.

Re:You don't think

[Anonymous Coward]

Poor joke. I will kill you with my bare Hans for that one.

Was using MS Sailor 2007 XP

[kbob88]

Cue up the jokes about how he shouldn't have automated his sailboat using Windows. Now facing the Blue Wave of Death.

Seriously though, there's a good chance he's OK. The weather out here has been great today, and he hasn't been gone that long. One of the following probably happened:

• Something broke and he's drifting around out there, probably to be spotted fairly soon as there's plenty of ship traffic and the Coasties are looking;
• Got blown off course and had to put in somewhere remote on the coast (unlikely as the winds aren't bad);
• Navigation broke down, he missed the Farallons (although you can usually see them from shore on a good day), went too far out, and is down coming back;
• Hit a whale / whale hit him -- not good, could sink the boat; hopefully he had a liferaft and was able to get into it;
• Hit by a ship (it's busy out there); definitely not good; but unlikely as weather has been very good
• Accidently fell overboard -- very bad, especially with our cold water here. That's why you don't make ocean passages alone, no matter how experienced you are.

Re:It's OK

[DrRevotron]

For a second there, I thought Slashdot would drop this stupid anti-Microsoft bullshit and at least show some compassion.

Re:It's OK

[Anonymous Coward]

For a second there, I thought Slashdot would drop this stupid anti-Microsoft bullshit and at least show some compassion.

If you come to slashdot for compassion, then I DO feel sorry for you.

Uh-oh.

[Jello B.]

I hope this turns out to be better than Mario is Missing.

Re:You don't think

[poopdeville]

I'd rather use a Hans held knife.

Re:It's sad really.

[Jello B.]

What's even sadder is that Ballmer & Gates weren't with him....But w

Wait, why isn't that thought finished? Did somebody mention Candlejack? Now there are two people mi

Re:technologist needs to use technology?

[Strider-]

If he was going offshore, he either had or should have had an EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. In effect, when deployed they transmit a beacon signal at 406MHz that contains a unique identifier, and can also include GPS coordinates.

These signals are picked up by either the INMARSAT geostationary satellites, or also passing weather satellites. Without a GPS position, the weather satellites can locate the beacon to within about 50 miles. With an integrated GPS receiver, the position will be reported to about 2 miles or so. (The message format doesn't have the space to transmit full resolution).

Negative comments

[Sabathius]

I heard he made an anti-microsoft comment and a chair hit the side of his boat.

More Info

[K-Man]

This story covers some of his recent database work.

Several news stories say that he called his daughter Sunday morning to say he was going out of cellphone range, but he didn't indicate any problems. The weather was clear, so it's puzzling that there were no sightings.

Sickening

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing all these Slashdot posts joking about a man who may very well be dead makes me sick.
Please have some respect for the man. I can understand joking about Hans Reiser because there is a motive behind what he did.
But this man hasn't done anything (at least to the best of my knowledge) to warrant any sort of morbid humor.

The man has 10 years of sailing experience apparently, so I can only hope for the best for him.

Re:Sickening

[AmberBlackCat]

In the last story, which was about debate over whether a small person was a separate species, a guy repeatedly threw around the term "bible thumper", presumably to refer to Christians. It was condescending enough to be a troll and definitely off-topic but he got modded insightful. The guys making fun of a guy who may have just died and presumably did nothing wrong, are getting modded funny. Somebody's going to be disgusted with what I'm saying right now and I have no idea how it will get modded or not modded. We'll all have a reason to feel sickened by Slashdot. I don't know if it's worth fighting.

Re:Sickening

[LordLucless]

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
        - George Bernard Shaw

Possibly run down by a larger ship

[Animats]

He went out in a 40-foot C&C 121 yacht. That's a very nice boat, with a epoxy resin laminate hull, carbon fiber reinforcement and masts, Kevlar sails, and a 38HP engine. There hasn't been any weather lately bad enough to give a boat like that any serious trouble. If it ran aground it would probably survive the experience.

But between San Francisco and the Farralon Islands is a major shipping lane. One with fog. Container ships and oil tankers come through there. Sizable fishing boats have been run down and sunk without anyone on a large ship even noticing. There's a USGS Vessel Traffic Service station and established traffic lanes for large ships, but small boats aren't required to check in with traffic control.

Re:technologist needs to use technology?

[Technician]

If he was going offshore, he either had or should have had an EPIRB [wikipedia.org] (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon.

Most of these are designed to float out of their holder in case of a sinking and are water activated. The lack of a signal for this size vessel is a good sign it's still afloat. Whether he is alive or onboard is to be seen. He could have had a medical emergency or fallen overboard which would not activate the beacon.

I had the pleasure...

[Anonymous Coward]

of meeting Jim a number of years ago. He struck me as a very thoughtful, very conscientious, and very nice man. My thoughts are with him and his family.

The rest of you modding and getting modded funny can die in a fire.

Not sickening, only human

[Riktov]

Is there anything anyone here can actually do to help rescue Jim Gray? I'd say almost certainly not.

So what are we to do? Those who have a connection with the man (knew him, worked with him, admire his work, etc.) will have serious and informative comments to make. But for the rest who've never heard of him, there's just nothing to discuss -- the story's not about technology in any way, it's just about a human being who happens to be related to technology. And death is easiest thing in the world to come up with jokes about -- "I bet he died because [a common failure in whatever area of technology he is related to]...ha,ha". Yes, the Microsoft/bluescreen jokes are pretty lame, but the SQL/database ones get a chuckle out of me.

What's the harm?

Re:Penguins

[ggeens]

MySQL's mascot is a dolphin.

And it seems like this guy worked on databases.

Re:You don't think

[kv9]

Hans shot first? /ducks

Please show some respect!

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

Do not make any sick jokes until AFTER a trragedy is confirmed.

Sailing in the SF Bay

[Temkin]

Just a couple bits of information for those not familiar with sailing in the SF bay. I used to own a small sailboat in the SF bay, a Cal-20. Just about the smallest (and slowest) real keel boat you can find. The SF Bay has some of the finest sailing in the world. Between April and October, the wind at the gate is a nice steady 7 to 10 knots all day long.

Most people think of California and picture the sunny beaches and warm water off LA. This doesn't exist north of Santa Cruz. California north of Santa Cruz has a rocky cliff shore. The water off SF is chilled by a current that comes down from Alaska. This time of year, it's probably 40 deg/F (4.5 deg/C), in the summer, it's not much warmer. The cold water kills people very fast. You fall in this time of year, and you have maybe 15 minutes before you're dead. They've lost experienced sailors to hypothermia inside the bay, where the water is slightly warmer, in the amount of time it takes the crew to pull down the sheets and do a man overboard 180. If he fell overboard without some kind of wetsuit or thermal protection, he's done. A 40 foot boat set up for solo would probably have some kind of steering autopilot, and would sail outside the initial search area on it's own in just a few hours.

The sea will try very hard to kill you. A fellow geek made the good life, and appears to have been settling in to enjoy his golden years. Most of us have similar dreams and aspirations. I don't know him, but I'm going to think good thoughts for him and his family, and hope for the best.

Re:If you are that old, ACCEPT IT!

[Moofie]

Listen up, not-old-people! It's not up to you what risks other people wish to undertake! If it doesn't pose an immediate danger to you, mind your own business!