SIGMOD Systems Award

The creators of BerkeleyDB are the recipients of the 2020 SIGMOD Systems Award for their seminal work in embodying simplicity, quality, and elegance in a high-performance key-value store that has impacted many systems and applications over the last 25 years.

The Systems Award to BerkeleyDB is the software and company (Sleepycat Software) that UBC Computer Science professor and Canada 150 Research Chair Margo Seltzer and her husband started in 1992, and sold to Oracle in 2006.

Sleepycat pioneered the open source dual license, which allowed a company to both make a product open source, and generate revenue.

BerkeleyDB contributors are (in alphabetical order): Don Anderson, Keith Bostic, Alan Bram, Greg Burd, Michael Cahill, Ron Cohen, Alex Gorrod, George Feinberg, Mark Hayes, Charles Lamb, Linda Lee, Susan LoVerso, John Merrells, Mike Olson, Carol Sandstrom, Steve Sarette, David Schacter, David Segleau, Margo Seltzer, Mike Ubell.

Congratulations go to Margo and the entire team!