His creativity is amazing: founder of a number of database companies, including Ingres, Illustra, Cohera, StreamBase Systems, Vertica, VoltDB, and Paradigm4...at MIT, where he has been involved in the development of the Aurora, C-Store, H-Store, Morpheus, and SciDB systems [1]

And his students:

-Daniel Abadi (co-founder and Chief Scientist of Hadapt)

-Michael J. Carey (faculty at UC Irvine, formerly at U. Wisconsin Madison, NAE Member and ACM Fellow)

-Robert Epstein (founder and former VP of Engineering of Sybase)

-Diane Greene (co-founder and former CEO of VMWare)

-Paula Hawthorn (founder of Britton-Lee, formerly VP of Engineering of Informix)

-Marti Hearst (Professor at UC Berkeley)

-Gerald Held (former VP of Engineering of Oracle)

-Joseph M. Hellerstein (faculty at UC Berkeley)

-Anant Jhingran (VP and CTO for IBM's Information Management Division)

-Curt Kolovson (Sr. Staff Research Scientist at VMware)

-Clifford A. Lynch (executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information)

-Mike Olson (former CEO of Sleepycat Software and founding CEO of Cloudera)

-Margo Seltzer (Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, founder and former CTO of Sleepycat Software)

-Dale Skeen (founder of Tibco, founder and CEO of Vitria)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker