Influential Paper Award

ICDE 2005 Influential Paper Award

The Volcano Optimizer Generator: Extensibility and Efficient Search
Goetz Graefe and William J. McKenna
Ninth International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE '93), 1993.
award talk slides (PPT)

Goetz Graefe
After earning MS and PhD degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984 and 1987, Goetz Graefe served on the faculties of the Oregon Graduate Institute, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Portland State University. Together with his students and with many outside collaborators, he investigated extensible query optimization and parallel query execution. Prototypes and published techniques were adopted by many university researchers as well as by Informix, Texas Instruments, Tandem, and Unisys. His research and prototyping efforts in parallel query execution won the "test of time award" at the 2000 ACM SIGMOD Conference. Since 1994, Goetz Graefe has been the query processing architect of Microsoft's SQL Server product development team.
His current interests span query optimization, query execution, storage structures, transaction technology, physical database design, and in particular online and incremental index operations.