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Congrats marcin.zukowski with the Dijkstra Fellowship Award for your groundbreaking work on database architecture! "I hope he will continue to build new technologies, teams and products, because he's great at it", CWI group leader Peter Boncz said in his laudation speech.

Some pictures of the CWI lectures on database architecture, more here: cwida.github.io/dbdbd2024/dijk… 🙏 to marcin.zukowski + Andy Pavlo (@andypavlo.bsky.social) @MadelonHulsebos Hannes Muehleisen, Viktor Leis and Allison Lee for their contributions, but also to all who made this a great event and attended!

Furthermore, we have now posted the video's of these lectures now in the Dutch Seminar on Data Systems Design (Dutch Seminar on Data Systems Design) seminar YT channel: bit.ly/cwida-dijkstra… many 🙏 @DLJtenWolde & Leonardo Kuffo Rivero from wida xie for editing!

But there's more! Last Friday, the day after the Dijkstra Award, it was our honor to host the 20th Dutch-Belgian Database Day (DBDBD2024) wida xie. It was well-attended and lively. 🙏 to all who made it possible. DBDBD2024 pictures are on cwida.github.io/dbdbd2024 (scroll down):

The closing of DBDBD 2024 was the "Amsterdam Data Systems" session, with talks from Databricks, MotherDuck and @ClickHouse (due to illness, Weaviate • vector database could not make it). These companies all have a significant presence in Amsterdam. Videos on YT: bit.ly/cwida-ams-data…

Happy to see MotherDuck opening shop in my hometown Amsterdam: bit.ly/motherduck-ams… In reality, DB team members for 1.5 years have already been renting offices near my research group CWI DA - but with a Dutch legal entity, and soon an own office, things are solidifying.

My group CWI DA is once again doing the local organization of my favorite conference: CIDR 2025 Check its exciting program here: cidrdb.org/cidr2025/progr… It will be held January 19-22 in the Amsterdam Mövenpick. Plan your trip quickly, because registration closes this Thursday!

In five days the CIDR2025 conference (cidrdb.org) will start, and we are expecting around 170 attendees from all over the world. On an completely unrelated note, the exotic "goldeneye" duck was just spotted in The Netherlands! See: bit.ly/duck-goldeneye

CIDR2025 is a wrap. Loved the talks & audience questions, Gong Show, DuckDB reception..⁦ Association for Computing Machinery⁩ pres Yannis Ioannidis talked on open science. Proceedings are in ACM DL & VLDB (see cidrdb.org). 🙏 all in+outside CWI DA⁩ who helped organize!!

DaMoN - The 21st International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware will be co-located with SIGMOD/PODS 2025. The submission deadline is March 14th, 2025. Checkout the website for further instructions. damon-db.org

Welcome Vanessa Evers as new CWI director! Excited my institute will be able to draw on your expertise in integrating AI & tech in social interactions. More than ever, it is important we advance technology in ways it positively contributes to societies. cwi.nl/en/news/vaness…

It's becoming harder to stomach typing *tweets* into this still lively platform, with the behavior of its new owner in full view everyday. Truly pray for US democracy to endure, and our transatlantic bonds to persist as they enable civilization as we know it.

We strive to ensure that the DuckDB project stays open-source in the long term. That's why we set up the DuckDB Foundation, an Amsterdam-based non-profit organization, in 2021. The Foundation owns the intellectual property of the DuckDB project and enshrines the availability of

PDX: A Data Layout for Vector Similarity Search Introduces a vertical data layout for vectors that accelerates similarity search through dimension-by-dimension processing, outperforming SIMD-optimized kernels. 📝arxiv.org/abs/2503.04422 👨🏽‍💻github.com/cwida/PDX

We are brewing something exciting for next week ⏳

SIGMOD2025 for the 1st time used a schedule where most papers are presented as posters only Tips for next time - gather user interest data prior to deciding poster/paper & room assignment - present posters in a (high ceiling) room with good acoustics & allot enough space + time

But CWI DA has no reason to complain, here in Berlin. Leonardo Kuffo at the preceding DaMoN2025 workshop won the Best Paper Award for a study that showed that for vector databases, it matters a lot which AWS CPU you pick. Congratulations to him!

And.. Azim Afroozeh put a lot of effort in open-sourcing the ALP floating point compressor (github.com/cwida/ALP). Leonardo Kuffo had written with him the SIGMOD2024 paper which now won a reproducibility award! + 🙏🙏 to the reproducibility committee - this is a ton of work