2025 VLDB Test of Time Award for CWI researcher Peter Boncz

Peter Boncz, researcher and leader of the Database Architectures (DA) research group at CWI, and his co-authors have received the VLDB Test of Time Award 2025. They received the prize at the 51st International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) in London, UK, on 3 September.

Publication date
3 sep 2025
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This prize awards the VLDB paper from 10 years ago that has had the most impact. Boncz was honoured for the influential paper ‘How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really?’, co-authored in 2015 with Viktor Leis, Andrey Gubichev, Atanas Mirchev, Alfons Kemper, and Thomas Neumann from TU Munich.

Crucial challenge

The award-winning article identified the cardinality estimation technique as the crucial challenge in query optimization. When users search in a large dataset, the database system must decide in which order it should best bring together different pieces of information – much like choosing the right sequence of steps in solving a puzzle. If the order is wrong, queries may run unnecessarily slowly. The article revealed that many popular systems were weaker at this task than expected. The paper also introduced the Join Order Benchmark (JOB), now a global standard for testing query optimizers.

Peter Boncz and his co-authors at the VLDB 2025 Test of Time Award prize ceremony.

About Peter Boncz

Boncz is internationally recognized as a pioneer of column-store databases, introduced in his PhD project MonetDB. He later co-developed vectorized query processing with his first PhD student Marcin Zukowski – methods now used in almost all analytical database systems, including BigQuery, Databricks, and Snowflake. These techniques are also used in DuckDB, a lightweight system for ‘embedded analytics’ that has millions of downloads each month, developed originally in the DA group and which still plays a central role in its current research. Boncz also co-founded six spin-offs and is active as an advisor to new ventures.

This is the second VLDB Test of Time Award for Peter Boncz, since he received it earlier in 2009 for work on optimizing memory access in column stores. His contributions have further been recognized with the 2024 CIDR Test of Time Award for vectorized query execution, his election as ACM Fellow (2022), the Humboldt Research Award (2013), and the ICTRegie Award (2006).

Peter Boncz says:

It is deeply rewarding to see that our ideas from a decade ago continue to guide both the research community and industry practice

Founded in 1946, CWI is the Netherlands’ national research institute for mathematics and computer science. With breakthroughs such as MonetDB and DuckDB, its database innovations are used worldwide.

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