Martin Kersten, CEO of MonetDB Solutions and a Research Fellow at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is awarded the 2014 ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, the most prestigious prize for researchers who have made innovative and significant contributions to database systems and databases.
Kersten received the award on June 26, 2014 at the annual ACM SIGMOD/PODS Conference. The award is named after Ted Codd (1923 - 2003) who invented the relational data model and was responsible for the significant development of the database field as a scientific discipline. The Awards Committee recognises the influential contributions of Kersten to the Big Data problem, his outstanding achievements in scientific research in advanced database architectures and his pioneering work in the realisation of MonetDB. According to Kersten, the massive accumulation of data requires fundamental research and changes in database management systems. In MonetDB Kersten has pioneered the columns-store technology since 1993. Nowadays the database management system is the most widespread open-source column-store database management system that is worldwide used in more than 130 countries with over 300,000 downloads.
Kersten’s work on MonetDB has been honoured earlier by several prestigious international awards, such as the 10-year VLDB Best Paper Award. Since 2011, column-store technology as pioneered in MonetDB has found its way into the product offerings of all major commercial database vendors in relational database systems.