David J. DeWitt (July 20, 1948) is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

specializing in

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...

research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to moving to MIT, DeWitt was the

John P. Morgridge John P. Morgridge (born 1933) is an American businessman who was the CEO and chairman of the board of Cisco Systems. Early life and education Morgridge was born to L. D. Morgridge and Ruth Gordon Morgridge, who were both teachers and church membe ...

Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was also a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, leading the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Lab at Madison, Wisconsin. Professor DeWitt received a B.A. degree from

Colgate University Colgate University is a private liberal arts college in Hamilton, New York. The college was founded in 1819 as the Baptist Education Society of the State of New York and operated under that name until 1823, when it was renamed Hamilton Theologi ...

in 1970, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1976. He then joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison and started the Wisconsin Database Group, which he led for more than 30 years. Professor DeWitt is known for his research in the areas of parallel databases,

benchmarking Benchmarking is the practice of comparing business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and best practices from other companies. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time and cost. Benchmarking is used to measure performan ...

object-oriented databases An object database or object-oriented database is a database management system in which information is represented in the form of objects as used in object-oriented programming. Object databases are different from relational databases which are ...

, and XML databases. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1998) for the theory and construction of database systems. He is also a Fellow of the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

. He received the ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award (now renamed

SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award The ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award is a lifetime research achievement award given by the ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data, at its yearly flagship conference (also called SIGMOD). According to its homepage, it is given "f ...

) in 1995 for his contributions to the database systems field. In 2009, ACM recognized the seminal contributions of his Gamma parallel database system project with the ACM Software System Award. Also in 2009, he received the

IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

for his contributions to the database systems field.

DeWitt Clause

Several commercial database vendors include an end-user license agreement provision, known as the ''DeWitt Clause'', that prohibits researchers and scientists from explicitly using the names of their systems in academic papers. In essence, a DeWitt Clause forbids the publication of database benchmarks that the database vendor has not sanctioned. The original DeWitt Clause was established by

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word '' ...

at the behest of Larry Ellison. Ellison was displeased with a benchmark study done by David DeWitt in 1982, then an assistant professor, using his Wisconsin Benchmark program, which showed that Oracle's system had poor performance.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dewitt, David American computer scientists Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Microsoft technical fellows Database researchers Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering University of Michigan alumni Industry and corporate fellows