UCLA emeritus professor Carlo Zaniolo has received the 2025 ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, which recognizes major, lasting contributions to database systems.
The award is named after Edgar Codd, who revolutionized data management by introducing the relational model, treating data as interrelated tables—a concept that became foundational in modern systems like SQLServer and Oracle.
Zaniolo’s database career began with his 1976 PhD at UCLA, where he independently identified multivalued dependencies, complementing Codd’s work on functional dependencies. He also offered a clearer definition of thethird normal form (3NF), now widely cited in database literature.
At Sperry Univac and Bell Labs, Zaniolo tackled practical database problems and proposed GEM, an object-oriented query system that prefigured modern XML and XQuery. He later helped pioneer LDL, a logic-based language extending Datalog, which evolved into LDL++, one of the first industrial-grade deductive databases.
At UCLA, the impact of Zaniolo’s work grew as his research expanded to include data stream processing, XML query languages, and regular expressions. His optimization techniques for pattern matching influenced SQL standards and earned him the 2012 SIGMOD Best Paper Award.
Zaniolo’s five-decade career helped move the field from early network models to relational, object-oriented, and logic-based systems. His work bridged theory and application, influencing both foundational research and practical technologies.
From his first correspondence with Codd as a PhD student to receiving the award named in his honor, Zaniolo’s career has continually broadened and enriched the field of databases.