2003 InfoWorld Innovator: Pat Selinger

Pat Selinger worked at IBM on the very first relational database more than two decades ago. Today, she is an IBM Fellow working in data management research and specializing in database standards and the underlying technologies that form the foundation of IBM's On Demandutility computing strategy. From deep within IBM research, she has driven a number of technologies, namely autonomics, information integration, and federation.

"We in data management have been working on some of the problems related to On Demand for coming up on 10 years now — federation, for example," Selingersays. "We've had a federation research project since 1993 or so."

Leading up to the areas in which she currently concentrates, Selinger worked on query processing engines, specifically the query optimizer that became the cost-based query optimization now being used across the database industry. The paper that she wrote more than 20 years ago on the topic, in fact, is still the first paper students read when learning about query optimization.

"I had an operating systems and programming language background. Those turned out to be ideal for synergizing database work because there are technologies taken from each," Selinger explains. That background helped her to contribute to the first SQL compiler. And she is still deeply involved in database standards.

"My involvement with standards was an IBM investment decision as well as my own personal decision because the open standards are going to provide us with strength moving forward. We have to be able to lead what goes into the standards and to shape them in ways that are right for our customers," she says. 

Selinger is directly managing the transformation IBM's database to incorporate XML, for instance. "That means taking DB2 and enhancing it to support XML, in particular to store, index, access, and query XML data as well as relational data." 

The course of her autonomic, federation, integration, and standards work has Selinger squarely involved with the major IBM initiative to bridge structured and unstructured data in such a manner that extends the power typically associated with a relational database, such as analytics, to unstructured data. 

"I spent the first 27 years of my career working in the structured data that all enterprises have. But it's the other 85 percent of the world's data, in spreadsheets, flat files, e-mail, and so forth, that we now need to reach out and manage, and that's the challenge for this next generation. That's what's worth sticking around for -- to see what happens."

(For profiles on the other nine 2003 InfoWorld Innovators, see Honoring the Innovators.)