Daniel Abadi

Daniel Abadi
Education	Brandeis University (BSc), University of Cambridge (MPhil), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Occupation(s)	Computer scientist, professor
Years active	2007–present
Employer(s)	University of Maryland, College Park
Known for	Database systems, stream processing, distributed architectures, graph databases, column-store technologies, PACELC theorem
Notable work	C-Store, HadoopDB, PACELC theorem

Daniel Abadi holds the position of Darnell-Kanal Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. His scholarly work centers on database systems, encompassing areas such as stream processing, distributed architectures, graph databases, and column-store technologies. He played a key role in creating C-Store, a column-oriented database system, as well as HadoopDB, which integrates relational database concepts with Hadoop. Both innovations have been successfully brought to market.

In 2010, Abadi formulated the PACELC theorem, an extension and enhancement of the CAP theorem, which was rigorously validated in 2018.

Education and career

Abadi completed his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Neuroscience at Brandeis University in 2002. The following year, he earned an MPhil from Cambridge University specializing in Computer Speech, Text, and Internet Technology. He obtained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 under the supervision of Samuel Madden. His doctoral thesis, titled Query Execution in Column-Oriented Database Systems, contributed to the development of C-Store at MIT—a project later commercialized by Vertica and subsequently acquired by Hewlett-Packard.

Beginning his academic career at Yale University as an assistant professor in 2007, he advanced to associate professor status by 2012. In 2010, his research on HadoopDB was commercialized through Hadapt, which was acquired by Teradata in 2014.

Since 2017, Abadi has served as the Darnell-Kanal Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland.

His 2008 dissertation on column-oriented query execution earned the prestigious SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award in 2009. Notably, two of his doctoral students—Alexander Thomson and Jose Faleiro—have also been recipients of this award for their own theses.

Abadi received an NSF CAREER award in 2009 and was honored with a Sloan Fellowship in 2011.

He was recognized with VLDB’s best paper award in 2007 for his work on Scalable Semantic Web Data Management Using Vertical Partitioning. Additionally, he received VLDB test-of-time awards in 2015 and 2019 for the papers C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS and HadoopDB: An Architectural Hybrid of MapReduce and DBMS Technologies for Analytical Workloads, respectively.

In recognition of his significant impact on stream processing, distributed systems, graph databases, and column-store architectures, Abadi was named an ACM Fellow in 2020.