They have resurrected an aging Oracle foe--Ingres, which uses database technology developed 32 years ago by two Berkeley scientists--to target Oracle's biggest source of profit: the steady, high-margin fees it charges for regular upgrades and support.

FORBES: Terry Versus Larry

Another, called Bloom, was developed by computer scientists at UC Berkeley for analysis of large data sets in the popular open source Hadoop database.

FORBES: Names You Need To Know: Scala And Typesafe

Since 1976, Paul Kay of the University of California, Berkeley, another of the paper's authors, has compiled a database of information about how 110 different languages assign colour adjectives to 330 different hues.

ECONOMIST: Psychology

One 2012 study by researchers at University of California, Berkeley and Princeton University examined more than 6, 400 University of California employees once they became aware of a database listing staffers' salaries.

WSJ: Workers Share Their Salary Secrets