Report on the 2001 SIGMOD and PODS Awards

The Annual SIGMOD and PODS Awards honor important contributors to the database field. The awards are presented at the annual SIGMOD/PODS Conference. For those of you who missed that presentation at the 2001 conference, this article reports on this year’s winners. Congratulations to all of them for these significant achievements. The SIGMOD Innovations award is given “For innovative and highly significant contributions of enduring value to the development, understanding, or use of database systems and databases.” This year’s winner is Prof. Rudolf Bayer of the Technical University of Munich, for his invention of the B-Tree (with Edward McCreight), of B-Tree prefix compression, and of lock coupling (a.k.a. crabbing) for concurrent access to B-Trees (with Mario Schkolnick). All of these techniques are widely used in commercial database products. Prof. Bayer has also made many other important research contributions to the database field over a 30 year career in the areas of transaction management, deductive database, digital libraries, and most recently OLAP where he developed (with Volker Markel) the UB-Tree index that exploits space-filling curves for multidimensional indexing.