Peter Boncz has been active in the database community during the past four decades, making him a veteran. He leads the Database Architectures research group of research institute CWI in Amsterdam and has been involved in six startup companies so far. He was recently appointed ACM Fellow for his contributions to modern database architectures, and is also professor at VU University in Amsterdam, specializing in analytical databases. He is also the founder and chairman of the graph database organization Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC), though this year he is on leave from the latter function, during his sabbatical stay at MotherDuck.
His academic background is in core database architecture, with the architecture of MonetDB the main topic of his PhD thesis – MonetDB won the 2016 ACM SIGMOD systems award. This work focused on architecture-conscious database research, which studies the interaction between computer architecture and data management techniques. His specific contributions are in cache-conscious join methods, query and transaction processing in columnar database systems, and vectorized query execution.
Peter Boncz has a strong track record in bridging the gap between academia and commercial application, receiving the Dutch ICT Regie Award 2006 for his role in the CWI spin-off company Data Distilleries. In 2008 he founded a new CWI spin-off company called Vectorwise, dedicated to state-of-the art business intelligence technology. He is also the co-recipient of the 2009 VLDB 10 Years Best Paper Award, and in 2013 received the Humboldt Research Award.