Description
Leader of the group Database Architectures: Stefan Manegold.
We, the Database Architectures (DA) research group of CWI, are well known as a top data systems research group, active in the broad area of data (management) systems and infrastructure for supporting data science. Our research group has a strong international reputation in academia and industry for pioneering column store technology, fast compression methods, vectorized query execution, on-line query-driven indexing (cracking), adaptive caching, and integration of statistical languages and analysis in database management systems.
We develop, distribute and maintain the MonetDB open-source system, and we have spawned multiple spin-off companies, including Data Distilleries, VectorWise and MonetDB Solutions. Our team also operates a self-built cluster, SciLens, that – unlike many other computer clusters – is bandwidth-optimized and thus better suited as a data-science infrastructure. We pride ourselves on revealing the real problems in our discipline and coming up with revolutionary solutions that are frequently ahead of their time.
Vacancies
No vacancies currently.
News

CWI Fellow Martin Kersten receives Royal decoration
Database pioneer Martin Kersten has been awarded a royal decoration today. Kersten was appointed Knight in the Royal Order of the Netherlands Lion, recognizing his merit in pioneering database research.

CWI Lectures on database research
This year’s edition of CWI Lectures revolved around database pioneer and CWI fellow Martin Kersten. Several international speakers discussed recent advances in their database research. Video recordings of the event are now available to view.

Snowflake’s co-founder Marcin Żukowski reflects on his time at CWI
“I knew it had amazing potential”, says Snowflake co-founder Marcin Żukowski, looking back on his time as a PhD researcher at CWI. In his PhD thesis, published in 2009, Żukowski described the blueprint of what would become two key technologies currently used by data storage and analytics provider Snowflake.

CWI PhD graduate founded record IPO company Snowflake
Data-warehouse company Snowflake went public this week, reaching an extraordinary market value of $70.4 billion, the largest IPO for a software company ever. Snowflake offers cloud-based data warehousing, whose data storage and query engine contain techniques pioneered in CWI’s Data Architectures group. One of the PhD graduates who developed that technology, former CWI researcher Marcin Żukowski, is co-founder of Snowflake.
Members
Associated Members
Publications
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Gubner, T.K, & Boncz, P.A. (2021). Charting the design space of query execution using VOILA. In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (pp. 1067–1097). doi:10.14778/3447689.3447709
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Lang, H, Beischl, A, Leis, V, Boncz, P.A, Neumann, T, & Kemper, A. (2020). Tree-Encoded Bitmaps. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (pp. 937–967). doi:10.1145/3318464.3380588
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Raasveldt, M. (2020, June 9). Integrating analytics with relational databases. SIKS Dissertation Series.
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Ghita, B, Gomes Tomé, D, & Boncz, P.A. (2020). White-box compression: Learning and exploiting compact table representations. In Proceedings of the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research.
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Kipf, A, Lang, H, Pandey, V.N, Persa, R.A, Anneser, C, Zacharatou, E.T, … Kemper, A. (2020). Adaptive main-memory indexing for high-performance point-polygon joins. In Advances in Database Technology - EDBT (pp. 347–358). doi:10.5441/002/edbt.2020.31
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Kruit, B.B, He, H., H, & Urbani, J. (2020). Tab2Know: Building a Knowledge Base from Tables in Scientific Papers. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science/Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-62419-4_20
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Gubner, T.K, Gomes Tomé, D, Lang, H, & Boncz, P.A. (2019). Fluid co-processing: GPU Bloom-filters for CPU joins. In Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware (pp. 9:1–9:10). doi:10.1145/3329785.3329934
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De Leo, D, & Boncz, P.A. (2019). Fast concurrent reads and updates with PMAs. In Proceedings of the Joint International Workshop on Graph Data Management Experiences & Systems (GRADES) and Network Data Analytics (NDA) 2019. doi:10.1145/3327964.3328497
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Boncz, P.A, Manegold, S, Ailamaki, A, Deshpande, A, & Kraska, T (Eds.). (2019). Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Management of Data. In P.A Boncz, S Manegold, A Ailamaki, A Deshpande, & T Kraska (Eds.), .
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Kipf, A, Vorona, D., Müller, J, Kipf, T, Radke, B, Leis, V, … Kemper, A. (2019). Estimating cardinalities with deep sketches. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (pp. 1937–1940). doi:10.1145/3299869.3320218
Software
MonetDB: high-performance query processing against very large databases
MonetDB is a relational database management system (DBMS) providing high performance on complex queries against large databases.
Current projects with external funding
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RelationalAI-CWI Research Agreement ()
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Actian Research Grant II (ACTIAN II)
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Cross-Industry Predictive Maintenance Optimization Platform (CIMPLO)
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Data Mining on High Volume Simulation Output (DAMIOSO)
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Databricks CWI Research Agreement (Databricks)
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Lokale Digitale Competentie centra (DCC) (DCC-NWO-I)
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Facebook Research Grant (Facebook)
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Research agreeement CWI - Databricks - vervolg contract (None)
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Process mining for multi-objective online control (PROMIMOOC)
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RelationalAI-CWI Research Grant Agreement (RelationalAI)
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Structure-aware Querying & Information Retrieval on Evolving Large Graphs (SQIREL-GRAPHS)
Related partners
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Actian Corporation
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BMW Munich
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Databricks
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LIACS Institute
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MonetDB B.V.
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Neo Technology AB
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OBI4wan B.V.
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RelationalAI
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Spinque
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Tata Steel
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WizeNoze B.V.
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Facebook