Database theory encapsulates a broad range of topics related to the study and research of the theoretical realm of databases and database management systems.
Seymour Ginsburg was an American pioneer of automata theory, formal language theory, and database theory, in particular; and computer science, in general. His work was influential in distinguishing theoretical Computer Science from the disciplines of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering.
Raymond F. Boyce (1946–1974) was an American computer scientist who was known for his research in relational databases. He is best known for his work co-developing the SQL database language and Boyce-Codd normal form.
Serge Joseph Abiteboul is a French computer scientist working in the areas of data management, database theory, and finite model theory.
Oscar Peter Buneman, is a British computer scientist who works in the areas of database systems and database theory.
Dan Suciu is a full professor of computer science at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 under the supervision of Val Tannen. After graduation, he was a principal member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs until he joined the University of Washington in 2000. Suciu does research in data management, with an emphasis on Web data management and managing uncertain data. He is a co-author of an influential book on managing semistructured data.
David Maier is the Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in the Department of Computer Science at Portland State University. Born in Eugene, OR, he has also been a computer science faculty member at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1978–82), Oregon Graduate Center, University of Wisconsin, Oregon Health & Science University (2001–present) and National University of Singapore (2012–15). He holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University (1978).
The chase is a simple fixed-point algorithm testing and enforcing implication of data dependencies in database systems. It plays important roles in database theory as well as in practice. It is used, directly or indirectly, on an everyday basis by people who design databases, and it is used in commercial systems to reason about the consistency and correctness of a data design. New applications of the chase in meta-data management and data exchange are still being discovered.
Yehoshua Chaim ("Shuky") Sagiv is a computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He obtained his PhD at Princeton University in 1978. His advisor was Jeffrey Ullman.
Alon Yitzchack Halevy is an Israeli-American computer scientist and a leading researcher in the area of data integration. He was a research scientist at Google from 2005 to 2015, when he left to become head of Recruit Institute of Technology. He left Recruit in 2018 and joined Facebook AI in 2019. Until 2006, he was a professor of computer science at the University of Washington, where his doctoral students included Xin Luna Dong. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1993, under the joint supervision of Richard Fikes and Edward Feigenbaum.
Victor Vianu is a computer scientist, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM from 2009 to 2015.
Tova Milo is a full Professor of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University and the Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences. She served as the head of the Computer Science Department from 2011 to 2014. Milo is the head of the data management group in Tel Aviv University, and her research focuses on Web data management. She received her PhD from the Hebrew University in 1992 under the supervision of Catriel Beeri, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and INRIA, France, prior to joining Tel Aviv University.
Martin L. Kersten was a computer scientist with research focus on database architectures, query optimization and their use in scientific databases. He was an architect of the MonetDB system, an open-source column store for data warehouses, online analytical processing (OLAP) and geographic information systems (GIS). He has been (co-) founder of several successful spin-offs of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI).
In relational database theory, a tuple-generating dependency (TGD) is a certain kind of constraint on a relational database. It is a subclass of the class of embedded dependencies (EDs).
Wenfei Fan is a Chinese-British computer scientist and professor of web data management at the University of Edinburgh. His research investigates database theory and database systems.
In database theory, Imieliński–Lipski algebra is an extension of relational algebra onto tables with different types of null values. It is used to operate on relations with incomplete information.
A reconstruction attack is any method for partially reconstructing a private dataset from public aggregate information. Typically, the dataset contains sensitive information about individuals, whose privacy needs to be protected. The attacker has no or only partial access to the dataset, but has access to public aggregate statistics about the datasets, which could be exact or distorted, for example by adding noise. If the public statistics are not sufficiently distorted, the attacker is able to accurately reconstruct a large portion of the original private data. Reconstruction attacks are relevant to the analysis of private data, as they show that, in order to preserve even a very weak notion of individual privacy, any published statistics need to be sufficiently distorted. This phenomenon was called the Fundamental Law of Information Recovery by Dwork and Roth, and formulated as "overly accurate answers to too many questions will destroy privacy in a spectacular way."
Gautam Das is a computer scientist in the field of databases research. He is an ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.
Phokion G. KolaitisACM is a computer scientist who is currently a Distinguished Research Professor at UC Santa Cruz and a Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His research interests include principles of database systems, logic in computer science, and computational complexity.
Nicola Leone is an Italian computer scientist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence, knowledge representation and reasoning, and database theory. Leone is currently the rector of the University of Calabria and a professor of Computer Science. Previously, he was a professor of Database Systems at the TU Wien.
