Alexey Milovidov
Alexey Milovidov (Алексей Миловидов) is the Russian engineer who created ClickHouse at Yandex Metrica, open-sourced it in 2016, and co-founded ClickHouse, Inc. in 2021, serving as its CTO from Amsterdam.
Alvin Cheung
Alvin Cheung is a computer scientist and professor at UC Berkeley who works on database systems and programming languages; he developed verified lifting and received a 2019 PECASE award.
Amit Singhal
Amit Singhal (Amitabh Kumar Singhal) is an Indian-American computer scientist who led the technical development of Google Search from 2000 until his retirement in 2016.
Barry Devlin
Barry A. Devlin, Irish IBM engineer who with Paul Murphy defined the first data warehouse architecture and coined business data warehouse in a 1988 IBM Systems Journal paper; later founded 9sight Consulting.
Bill Inmon
Bill Inmon (William H. Inmon), American computer scientist called the Father of Data Warehousing; wrote Building the Data Warehouse (1992), defined the four-property data warehouse, created the Corporate Information Factory, founded Prism Solutions, and later developed DW 2.0 and textual disambiguation.
C. Mohan
C. Mohan, full name Chandrasekaran Mohan, is a database researcher best known for inventing the ARIES recovery algorithms and the Presumed Abort commit protocol during a 38.5-year career at IBM.
Chad Sanderson
Chad Sanderson is an American data-technology executive, CEO and co-founder of Gable (formerly of Convoy, Microsoft, Sephora, Subway, Oracle), author of the O'Reilly book Data Contracts, and founder of Data Quality Camp.
Charles Bachman
Charles Bachman (1924–2017) was an American computer scientist who created Integrated Data Store, the first commercial database management system, and won the 1973 A.M. Turing Award for it.
Dain Sundstrom
Dain Sundstrom is an American software engineer, co-creator of Presto (2012, Facebook, with Traverso, Phillips, and Hwang), now Trino after the 2018 fork; he co-founded Starburst, was its CTO until 2025, and is a Trino BDFL and Trino Software Foundation board member.
Dan Linstedt
Dan Linstedt is the American data architect who invented the Data Vault data warehouse modeling method (hubs, links, satellites) in the 1990s, published it from 2002, created Data Vault 2.0, and co-founded Scalefree and DataVaultAlliance.
David B. Lomet
David B. Lomet is a database systems researcher and principal researcher at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018.
David DeWitt
David DeWitt is an American computer scientist known for parallel database systems and benchmarking, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor emeritus elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1998.
Doug Cutting
Doug Cutting (born 1961), American software engineer and Stanford graduate, founder of Apache Lucene, Nutch, Hadoop, and Avro; Hadoop creator at Yahoo!, later Cloudera chief architect and former ASF board chairman.
Drew Banin
Drew Banin, co-founder of dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics) with Tristan Handy and Connor McArthur in 2016, former Chief Product Officer until January 2022, built the first dbt prototype and studied at Drexel University.
Hannes Mühleisen
Hannes Mühleisen is the German-born computer scientist who co-created DuckDB with Mark Raasveldt at CWI Amsterdam and co-founded DuckLabs (formerly DuckDB Labs), which joined AWS in 2026.
Jacques Nadeau
Jacques Nadeau is an American open source software engineer: co-founder and CTO of Dremio, co-founder and CEO of Sundeck, co-creator and founding PMC chair of Apache Arrow, co-creator of Substrait, and founding PMC chair of Apache Drill.
Jay Kreps
Jay Kreps (born about 1980), American software engineer; co-creator of Apache Kafka, Voldemort, and Samza at LinkedIn; co-founder and longtime CEO of Confluent, later an Anthropic director; Confluent was acquired by IBM.
Jeff Hammerbacher
Jeff Hammerbacher is an American data scientist and entrepreneur who founded Facebook's Data team (2006–2008), co-founded Cloudera, coined 'data scientist' with DJ Patil, and moved into biomedicine via Hammer Lab and Related Sciences.
Jeremiah Lowin
Jeremiah Lowin is the American founder and CEO of Prefect, the workflow orchestration company, and creator of FastMCP, the Python framework for building Model Context Protocol servers. Former hedge fund risk manager, early Apache Airflow PMC member, Prefect is acquiring Dagster.
Joe Reis
Joe Reis, Salt Lake City data engineer, co-author of the O'Reilly bestseller Fundamentals of Data Engineering with Matt Housley, Ternary Data co-founder, creator of Mixed Model Arts and The Joe Reis Show.
Jordan Tigani
Jordan Tigani is an American database engineer, co-founder and CEO of MotherDuck (2022), built on DuckDB. Previously a founding engineer, engineering director, and product lead of Google BigQuery (Dremel) and CPO of SingleStore; author of the Big Data is Dead thesis.
Joseph M. Hellerstein
Joseph M. Hellerstein (not Joseph L. Hellerstein of UW) is a UC Berkeley EECS computer science professor, Jim Gray Professor, database researcher, Trifacta and RunLLM co-founder, and 2023 SIGMOD Codd Innovations Award winner.
Julien Le Dem
Julien Le Dem is a French software architect, open source leader, and entrepreneur who co-created Apache Parquet, Apache Arrow, and OpenLineage; chaired Parquet at the ASF, co-founded Datakin (acquired by Astronomer), and is now Principal Engineer at Datadog in Berkeley, California.
Kostas Tzoumas
Kostas Tzoumas (Κώστας Τζούμας), Greek computer scientist from Ioannina; co-founder and CEO of Berlin's Data Artisans, commercializer of Apache Flink; PhD from Aalborg; sold to Alibaba for a reported 90 million euros in 2019, renamed Ververica.
Lloyd Tabb
Lloyd Tabb, American software developer, founder and CTO of Looker (Santa Cruz data analytics, sold to Google for $2.6B), designer of LookML, earlier Borland and Netscape engineer, now co-creator of the Malloy data language at Meta.
Marcel Kornacker
Marcel Kornacker, database engineer, UC Berkeley PhD (2000), founding tech lead of Google F1's query engine, creator of Apache Impala, co-creator of Apache Parquet, and CTO and co-founder of Pixeltable, the multimodal AI data infrastructure company launched December 2024.
Mark Raasveldt
Mark Raasveldt is the Dutch database researcher who co-created DuckDB at CWI Amsterdam and is co-founder and CTO of DuckLabs, lead architect of its execution engine.
Martin Kleppmann
Martin Kleppmann, British computer scientist and Cambridge Associate Professor, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications (2017, 2nd ed. 2026), co-founder of Rapportive and Automerge, and coiner of local-first software.
Martin Traverso
Martin Traverso, software engineer; co-creator of Presto (2012, Facebook) and its fork Trino, with Sundstrom, Phillips, and Hwang; co-founder of the Trino Software Foundation and CTO of Starburst Data.
Maxime Beauchemin
Maxime Beauchemin (@mistercrunch) is a software engineer, original creator of Apache Airflow (2014, Airbnb) and Apache Superset (originally Caravel), founder and CEO of Preset, and now builder of the AI-agent orchestration platform Agor.