Peter Boncz is a Dutch

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

specializing in

database systems In computing, a database is an organized collection of Data (computing), data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, Application software, applications, and ...

. He is a researcher at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and professor at the

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam The (abbreviated as ''VU Amsterdam'' or simply ''VU'' when in context) is a public university, public research university in Amsterdam, Netherlands, founded in 1880. The VU Amsterdam is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in ...

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 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 l ...

, 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. 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 Actian Vector (formerly known as VectorWise) 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 ...

. 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 SPSS Statistics is a statistical software suite developed by IBM for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and criminal investigation. Long produced by SPSS Inc., it was acquired by IBM in 2009. Versi ...

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 Actian is an American software company headquartered in Santa Clara, California that provides Analytics, analytics-related software, products, and services. The company sells database, database software and technology, Cloud computing, cloud en ...

in 2010. As Fellow at the

Technical University of Munich The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; ) is a public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences. Established in 1868 by King Ludwig II ...

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 Fellow ACM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognises outstanding members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The title of ACM Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals ...

s, "for contributions to the design of columnar, main-memory, and vectorized database systems". In 2019, Boncz' Database Architectures group members Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt launched a new

Column-oriented DBMS Data orientation is the representation of tabular data in a linear memory model such as in-disk or in-memory. The two most common representations are column-oriented (columnar format) and row-oriented (row format). The choice of data orienta ...

named

DuckDB DuckDB is an open-source column-oriented Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). It is designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases in embedded configuration, such as combining tables with hundreds of ...

, which incorporates ideas from

and Hyper. 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). 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. Boncz is spending his 2023-2024 sabbatical at MotherDuck.

References

External links

Website
at CWI Dutch computer scientists Living people 21st-century Dutch scientists Year of birth missing (living people) Database researchers Scientists from Amsterdam Academic staff of the University of Amsterdam 2022 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery University of Amsterdam alumni {{compu-scientist-stub