Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd was an English computer scientist who, while working for IBM, invented the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases and relational database management systems. He made other valuable contributions to computer science, but the relational model, a very influential general theory of data management, remains his most mentioned, analyzed and celebrated achievement.
James Nicholas Gray was an American computer scientist who received the Turing Award in 1998 "for seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation".
Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.
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.
Alberto O. Mendelzon was an Argentine-Canadian computer scientist who died on June 16, 2005.
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).
Samuel R. Madden is an American computer scientist specializing in database management systems. He is currently a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Patricia G. Selinger is an American computer scientist and IBM Fellow, best known for her work on relational database management systems.
Michael Ralph Stonebraker is a computer scientist specializing in database systems. Through a series of academic prototypes and commercial startups, Stonebraker's research and products are central to many relational databases. He is also the founder of many database companies, including Ingres Corporation, Illustra, Paradigm4, StreamBase Systems, Tamr, Vertica and VoltDB, and served as chief technical officer of Informix. For his contributions to database research, Stonebraker received the 2014 Turing Award, often described as "the Nobel Prize for computing."
Tomasz Imieliński is a Polish-American computer scientist, most known in the areas of data mining, mobile computing, data extraction, and search engine technology. He is currently a professor of computer science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, United States.
Jennifer Widom is an American computer scientist known for her work in database systems and data management. She is notable for foundational contributions to semi-structured data management and data stream management systems. Since 2017, Widom is the dean of the School of Engineering and professor of computer science at Stanford University. Her honors include the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and multiple lifetime achievement awards from the Association for Computing Machinery.
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.
Anastasia Ailamaki is a Professor of Computer Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and the Director of the Data-Intensive Applications and Systems (DIAS) lab. She is also the co-founder of RAW Labs SA, a Swiss company developing real-time analytics infrastructures for heterogeneous big data. Formerly, she was an associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.
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).
Laura M. Haas is an American computer scientist noted for her research in database systems and information integration. She is best known for creating systems and tools for the integration of heterogeneous data from diverse sources, including federated technology that virtualizes access to data, and mapping technology that enables non-programmers to specify how data should be integrated.
Juliana Freire de Lima e Silva is a Brazilian computer scientist who works as a professor of computer science and engineering at the New York University. She is known for her research in information visualization, data provenance, and computerized assistance for scientific reproducibility.
Zehra Meral Özsoyoglu is a Turkish-American computer scientist specializing in databases, including research on query languages, database model, and indexes, and applications of databases in science, bioinformatics, and medical informatics. She is the Andrew R. Jennings Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Case Western Reserve University.
Paula Birdwell Hawthorn is an American computer scientist. She is recognised as an expert and pioneer in database systems. She has also founded organisations for women in computer science and created affirmative action programs to support students in the field.
Daniel Abadi is the Darnell-Kanal Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park. His primary area of research is database systems, with contributions to stream databases, distributed databases, graph databases, and column-store databases. He helped create C-Store, a column-oriented database, and HadoopDB, a hybrid of relational databases and Hadoop. Both database systems were commercialized by companies.
Andrew Pavlo, best known as Andy Pavlo, is an associate professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He conducts research on database management systems and is especially interested in "main memory systems, self-driving / autonomous architectures, transaction processing systems, and large-scale data analytics". Pavlo is also a co-founder and CEO of OtterTune, a database startup that provides automatic database tuning services.
