Another great read that was a collaboration of Stonebreaker, Joseph Hellerstein, and Peter Ballis is the RED (Readings in databases) book. It's been around for a while, and was updated just a few years ago - http://www.redbook.io/
I read the Red Book when I was figuring out data architectures for my company. (the other book was Designing Data-Intensive Archictures by Martin Kleppmann)
Stonebraker et al are very opinionated (especially about SQL and relational databases), but in a way I can accept because a lot of his thinking is based on first-principles. Stonebraker also has a string of database successes (Ingres, Postgres, Vertica etc.) which gives him enough street cred to prove he's not just spewing theory from an ivory tower. He's not necessarily correct in every opinion, but his opinions are interesting and worth considering. I enjoyed his talk on "Why Big Data is at least 4 different problems"
I generally tend to agree that he can be extremely opinionated especially these days. A lot of his opinions being on first-principles helps, though some of those have evolved a bit over the year. The red book in particular I appreciate because it wasn't solely Stonebreaker but rather a collaboration. My understanding is the updated version there was a bit of back and forth on some of those things about re-writing history or being overly opinionated on certain things that were a bit one sided vs. a balanced view. The end result ended up nice and balanced, but it was in large part because it was a work of 3 very knowledgable people in the space.
Added to that he runs commercial companies and continues to do so based on database technologies. I'd rather take an opinionated answer from someone of his caliber (Turing award + running successful commercial companies based on the same tech).
