Peter Boncz

Last updated
Peter Boncz
Born
Amsterdam
CitizenshipDutch
Alma mater University of Amsterdam (Ph.D.)
Known for MonetDB
VectorWise
MotherDuck
Awards2022 ACM Fellow
Scientific career
Fields Computer Science
Institutions Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
Thesis Monet; a next-Generation DBMS Kernel For Query-Intensive Applications  (2002)
Doctoral advisor Martin L. Kersten
Website homepages.cwi.nl/~boncz/

Peter Boncz is a Dutch computer scientist specializing in database systems. He is a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the special chair of Large-Scale Analytical Data Management.

He is a pioneer and expert in the area of high performance, analytical database systems. As part of his PhD work, he designed MonetDB, one of the first relational column database systems. MonetDB is widely influential in the design of commercial analytical database systems and in recognition the team received 10-year Best Paper Award at VLDB 2009. [1] In 2004 he started the MonetDB/X100 research project, aiming to significantly improve the performance of MonetDB via vectorized processing. This research project led to a commercial spin-off VectorWise.

Boncz's research in database technologies created multiple spin-off companies. Data Distilleries (1996-2003) focused on developing data mining software and used MonetDB as its backend. Data Distilleries was acquired by SPSS in 2003. MonetDB BV (2008-present) provides consulting and support service for MonetDB users. Vectorwise (2008-2010) commercialized the X100 research project and was acquired by Actian in 2010. As Fellow at the Technical University of Munich he was also involved in the spin-off around the Hyper database system, that is now part of the Tableau analytics tool.

Boncz was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to the design of columnar, main-memory, and vectorized database systems". [2]

In 2019, Boncz' Database Architectures group members Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt launched a new Column-oriented DBMS named DuckDB [3] , which incorporates ideas from MonetDB, VectorWise and Hyper [4] . Its performance and ease-of use rapidly gained it popularity, and this spawned the spin-off company DuckDB Labs (2021) that employs the core team, and later MotherDuck (2022) [5] . The latter aims at putting DuckDB in the cloud using the concept of "hybrid query processing" in which both client and server contain a DuckDB processor [6] . Boncz is spending his 2023-2024 sabbatical at MotherDuck.

Related Research Articles

ABC is an imperative general-purpose programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) developed at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Netherlands by Leo Geurts, Lambert Meertens, and Steven Pemberton. It is interactive, structured, high-level, and intended to be used instead of BASIC, Pascal, or AWK. It is intended for teaching or prototyping, but not as a systems-programming language.

The Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica is a research centre in the field of mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is part of the institutes organization of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and is located at the Amsterdam Science Park. This institute is famous as the creation site of the programming language Python. It was a founding member of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MonetDB</span> Open source column-oriented relational database management system

MonetDB is an open-source column-oriented relational database management system (RDBMS) originally developed at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. It is designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases, such as combining tables with hundreds of columns and millions of rows. MonetDB has been applied in high-performance applications for online analytical processing, data mining, geographic information system (GIS), Resource Description Framework (RDF), text retrieval and sequence alignment processing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steven Pemberton</span>

Steven Pemberton is a researcher affiliated with the Distributed and Interactive Systems group at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hendrik Lenstra</span> Dutch mathematician

Hendrik Willem Lenstra Jr. is a Dutch mathematician.

A column-oriented DBMS or columnar DBMS is a database management system (DBMS) that stores data tables by column rather than by row. Benefits include more efficient access to data when only querying a subset of columns, and more options for data compression. However, they are typically less efficient for inserting new data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard D. Gill</span> British mathematician

Richard David Gill is a British-Dutch mathematician. He has held academic positions in the Netherlands. As a probability theorist and statistician, Gill has researched counting processes. He is also known for his consulting and advocacy on behalf of alleged victims of statistical misrepresentation, including the reversal of the murder conviction of a Dutch nurse who had been jailed for six years.

XLDB is a yearly conference about databases, data management and analytics. The definition of extremely large refers to data sets that are too big in terms of volume, and/or velocity, and/or variety to be handled using conventional solutions. This conference deals with the high-end of very large databases (VLDB). It was conceived and it is chaired by Jacek Becla.

Andries Evert Brouwer is a Dutch mathematician and computer programmer, Professor Emeritus at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He is known as the creator of the greatly expanded 1984 to 1985 versions of the roguelike computer game Hack that formed the basis for NetHack. He is also a Linux kernel hacker. He is sometimes referred to by the handle aeb.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Vitányi</span> Dutch theoretical computer scientist

Paul Michael Béla Vitányi is a Dutch computer scientist, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam and researcher at the Dutch Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.

Ronald John Fitzgerald Cramer is a professor at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam and the University of Leiden. He obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1997. Prior to returning to the Netherlands he was at the University of Aarhus.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Schrijver</span> Dutch mathematician and computer scientist

Alexander (Lex) Schrijver is a Dutch mathematician and computer scientist, a professor of discrete mathematics and optimization at the University of Amsterdam and a fellow at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. Since 1993 he has been co-editor in chief of the journal Combinatorica.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Actian Vector</span>

Actian Vector is an SQL relational database management system designed for high performance in analytical database applications. It published record breaking results on the Transaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark for database sizes of 100 GB, 300 GB, 1 TB and 3 TB on non-clustered hardware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Actian</span> American software company

Actian is an American software company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that provides analytics-related software, products, and services. The company sells database software and technology, cloud engineered systems, and data integration solutions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin L. Kersten</span> Dutch computer scientist (born 1953)

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).

Constance van Eeden was a Dutch mathematical statistician who made "exceptional contributions to the development of statistical sciences in Canada". She was interested in nonparametric statistics including maximum likelihood estimation and robust statistics, and did foundational work on parameter spaces.

David C. Parkes is a British-American computer scientist. He is the George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science and Co Faculty Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative. From 2013–17, he was Area Dean for Computer Science. Parkes is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Daniel Abadi is the Darnell-Kanal Professor of Computer Science at University of Maryland, College Park and was named an ACM Fellow in 2020. His primary area of research is database systems. He is known for his contributions to distributed databases, column-store databases, deterministic databases, graph databases, and stream databases. Specifically, he developed the storage and query execution engines of the C-Store prototype, which was commercialized by Vertica and later acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2011. His HadoopDB research on fault tolerant scalable analytical database systems was commercialized by Hadapt and acquired by Teradata in 2014.

Josephus C.M. Baeten is a Dutch computer scientist and mathematician, who has published on process calculus, concurrency theory, formal methods, model-based software engineering, model-based systems engineering and theory of computation.

Krzysztof R. Apt is a Polish computer scientist. He defended his PhD in mathematical logic in Warsaw, Poland in 1974. His research interests include program correctness and semantics, use of logic as a programming language, distributed computing, and game theory. Besides his own research, he has been heavily involved in service to the computing community, notably by promoting the use of logic in computer science and by advocating open access to scientific literature.

References

  1. ↑ "10-year Best Paper Award, VLDB".
  2. ↑ "Global computing association names 57 fellows for outstanding contributions that propel technology today". Association for Computing Machinery. January 18, 2023. Retrieved 2023-01-18.
  3. ↑ "New CWI spin-off company DuckDB Labs: Solutions for fast database analytics". Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. July 14, 2021. Retrieved 2023-11-10.
  4. ↑ "Why DuckDB" . Retrieved 2023-11-10.
  5. ↑ "CWI spin-off DuckDB Labs partners with MotherDuck, who raises $47.5 million". Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. November 17, 2022. Retrieved 2023-11-10.
  6. ↑ "MotherDuck Architecture" . Retrieved 2023-11-10.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.