Article Source

• Query Execution in MonetDB

Query Execution in MonetDB

• Speaker: Martin Kersten

Biography

Biography He started his career in computer science as research assistant in 1975. As of 1979 he was scientific researcher and lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Until 1985 he worked on database security, database programming languages and he developed a relational DBMS, which became a component of a commercial CASE environment from 1985 to 1991. He was visiting researcher at the University of California, San Francisco (1980 and 1983), visiting researcher Stanford University (2001 and 2002), and Microsoft Research (2005).

In 1985 he moved to Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands, to establish the Database Research Group. Between 1986 and 1990, he was co-designer of the PRISMA database machine, an RDBMS for a 100-node multiprocessor. In a follow up ESPRIT-II project Kersten was responsible for the development of an enhanced version of SQL for documents and geographical data. From 1989 to 1993, he led a national project on the exploitation of the Amoeba distributed system for advanced database management and a national project for database design formalizations.

Data mining projects in the 1990s required better analytical database support. This resulted in a CWI the spin-off called Data Distilleries, which used early MonetDB implementations in its analytical suite. Data Distilleries eventually became a subsidiary of SPSS in 2003, which in turn was acquired by IBM in 2009.

In April 1992 he became the head of the department of Information Systems. At the same time he started the ESPRIT-III Pythagoras project aimed at performance quality assessment of advanced database systems. He remained associate professor at the Vrije Universiteit, teaching advanced courses on database technology until mid-1994. In 1992 he became an associated professor at the University of Amsterdam and a full professor in multimedia databases in January 1994.

Between 1997 and 2010, Kersten served as head of the Database Architectures research group at the CWI Amsterdam. Since 2011 Kersten was a research fellow at the CWI.

Kersten was an active reviewer for European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology (ESPRIT) projects and scientific publications. Moreover, he was a trustee of the VLDB Endowment board, which aims to promote and exchange scholarly work in databases and related fields worldwide. Since 2007 Kersten was also editorial board member of “PVLDB” and he served on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Database Systems journal in 2010.

In 2017 he became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 2020 he became Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion.