From Facebook to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the world is catalogued in databases. No one knows it better than MIT adjunct professor and entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who has spent the last 25 years developing the technology that made it so. He got his big break by inventing and commercializing technology that underlies most of the databases, known as relational databases, that rule today. But Stonebraker now happily calls his earlier inventions largely obsolete. He's working on a new generation of database technology that can handle the flood of digital data that is starting to overwhelm established methods.

"Relational databases are omnipresent as the solution for enterprise data. They have been fabulously successful," Stonebraker says. But he says that the largest database vendors, including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, still sell such products as being appropriate for any business. Stonebraker has a different view: that new database technologies are required to handle the exponential increases in the information that businesses must handle. Stonebraker, 67, is already finding success with several of his own new approaches.