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 Codd Innovations Award and was also selected to be an ACM Fellow.In 2008 I retired from University of Wisconsin-Madison to start the Jim Gray Systems Lab for Microsoft. This is a small lab, reporting into the SQL Server Business unit, whose goal is to explore novel technologies for including into the SQL Azure and SQL Server product lines. The URL for the lab is graysystemslab.comAfter nearly 9 years at Microsoft, I was ready for a change and a return to academia. I became an adjunct professor at MIT in 2017 where I develop database management systems and explore novel database systems technologies. In July 2021, I joined the team at Splunk to help uncover innovative ways we can solve today’s toughest data challenges in the cloud, and advance data analysis and query strategies as data volumes exponentially increase worldwide.