Homepage of Peter Boncz

notable (recent) activities:

The INS1 research theme at CWI, where I work aims at researching database technology, applied to query-intensive domains like data mining, XML databases and multimedia retrieval.

Professional Activities

My CV is publicly available via:
View Peter Boncz's profile on LinkedIn

Being a database architect, my research tends to be clustered around efforts to build database systems:

All these research activities are funded as part of the 6-year project MultimediaN, by the Dutch Government (BSIK), in which I lead the database sub-project with involvement from Philips Research and Technical University Twente (CTIT). In this context, CWI has research collaborations with NFI (MonetDB/XQuery), SPSS (X100) and TextKernel BV (X100).

Ph.D. Students

These students worked in MultimediaN (2004-2009), in which I was the lead in of of the projects (14FTE at CWI, Philips Research, U Twente). I am also advising: Both positions are in the XIRAF project 2007-2009, jointly with the Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI).

PC Memberships

Major conferences:

other PCs:

Additionally, I have served as referee for major journal publications:

Organization

Past Work

In may 2002, I completed and defended my PhD thesis on MonetDB. MonetDB is an experiment in database architecture (gone out of hand) that proposes to use full vertical fragmentation in order to better accommodate query-intensive access patterns, both in terms of I/O optimization as well as for improving the access to the memory caches. MonetDB also uses a column-wise query-processing algebra that has a zero degree of freedom, which makes it possible to use a generic but pre-compiled query engine, as opposed to the interpretative techniques used in other DBMSs. Compile-time fixed query processing primitives are crucial for modern CPUs like the Pentium 4, which need highly predictable code in order to avoid branch mispredictions, as well as an ever present pool of independent instructions (in order to fill its parallel units and obtain a good Instructions-Per-Cycle ratio). Note that compile-time here means DBMS build time, and not query-compilation-time, which is a run-time activity. A final MonetDB design issue was extensibility: by constructing MonetDB as a back-end, on top of which multiple front-end systems can work and interact with the storage/query on a lower level than, say, SQL allows to re-use the same system in multiple application domains, which was one of MonetDB's design goals. MonetDB has been applied successfully to OLAP, data mining, GIS, k-NN search, XML-, image- and video-databases.

During my time as PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam, our research group founded Data Distilleries (DD -- it has been acquired in 2004 by SPSS), and I was with it almost from the beginning. Its decison management tools are powered by MonetDB, and as such I got deeply involved, spending more than two years full time as overall product architect at the company. As such I architected and designed large parts of the new real time suite as well, getting acquainted with J2EE application server technology in the area of real-time marketing and also real-time heterogeneous databases. As any start-up company job, this was not about software architecture alone, and I learned a lot about software engineering methodology in practice, but also on project and product management. However, the most fun part was always going on site visits to the clients of DD, which are mostly big companies (like ABN Amro, ING Postbank, Aegon, Vodafone, Center Parcs, OHRA, IMP) getting to the highly-protected machine room, where between many huge mainframes, a Unix or NT server would be (and is still) running MonetDB!

Research Interests

So, since the start of 2002 I'm back at CWI doing research into:

Publications


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