Patricia Selinger

Who is Patricia Selinger?

Patricia Selinger is an American computer scientist and IBM Fellow, best known for her work on relational database management systems. She played a fundamental role in the development of System R, a pioneering relational database implementation, and wrote the canonical paper on relational query optimization. The dynamic programming algorithm for determining join order proposed in that paper still forms the basis for most of the query optimizers used in modern relational systems.

She was made an IBM Fellow in 1994, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999, and won the SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2002. Before her retirement, she was the Vice President of Data Management Architecture and Technology at IBM. She received A.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from Harvard University. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.