# Patrick Valduriez

Patrick Valduriez (born 12 May 1955) is a French computer scientist working in the area of data science, in particular on distributed and parallel data management. Valduriez is a researcher at Inria, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation.

## Career and research

Valduriez was born in Calais, France. After completing a bachelor's degree in computer science and technology at University of Lille in 1975, he obtained a master's degree in computer science at Pierre et Marie Curie University in Paris in 1977. Then, he worked for two years as a programmer for the French Ministry of Cooperation in Cotonou, Bénin. Back in France, he completed a PhD in computer science on parallel data processing under the supervision of Professor Georges Gardarin at Pierre et Marie Curie University and Inria in 1981.
After his doctoral degree, Valduriez obtained a position as junior researcher at Inria in 1982. In 1985, he joined Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), to work on the Bubba parallel database system. There, he invented the concept of join indices, which has been used by relational database systems to improve the performance of complex queries involving joins between large tables. In mid 1989, he returned to Inria as a senior researcher, where he successively created and led three teams: Rodin in Rocquencourt in 1990, Atlas in Nantes in 2002, and Zenith in Montpellier in 2012. A major outcome of the Zenith team has been the Pl@ntNet citizen science platform for plant identification.
Since 2019, Valduriez has been the chief scientific officer at LeanXcale, a company that develops a next-generation SQL database system. He is also the scientific director of the Inria-Brasil international partnership and a collaborator at LNCC Petropolis, Brazil.
Valduriez has co-authored over 300 papers in top database conferences and journals, with over 22,000 citations and H-Index 61 (computed by Google Scholar). He was the general chair of the SIGMOD conference 2004 in Paris, which was held for the first time outside North America, the 11th international conference on Extending Database Technology 2008 in Nantes and the 35th international conference on Very Large Data Bases 2009 in Lyon. He has served on the editorial board of top database journals including: ACM Transactions on Database Systems (1993-1998), The VLDB Journal (1998-2001, 2012-2015), Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (2009-2012), and Distributed and Parallel Databases (since 1998). Since 1990, he has been involved in the management of the French database research community (BDA), first as a member and then as the president of the BDA steering committee (2017-2020).
During his career, Valduriez has played an active role in technology transfer. The parallel query processor he developed at MCC was the basis for a transfer in 1994 to NCR (then an MCC's shareholder) for its Navigator database product. From 1986 to 2001, he headed Dyade, a strategic R&D joint venture between Bull and Inria to develop information and communication technologies, which were eventually transferred into Bull products or open-source software. Dyade gave birth to four companies (still in business): Jalios, KelKoo, Scalagent, and TrustedLogic (now Trustonic). In the context of Dyade, in 1999, the DISCO data integration system he developed within his Rodin team was the basis for a transfer to Kelkoo. In 2016, he transferred the CloudMdsQL multistore system
to LeanXcale. He has also been a contributor to LeanXcale's transaction processing technology.
Valduriez's research is on data science, focusing on large-scale data distribution and parallel processing of big data.

## Books

Valduriez coauthored several major books on data management.
* Principles of Distributed Database Systems (1991) with M. Tamer Özsu
* Principles of Distributed Database Systems, second edition (1996) with M. Tamer Özsu
* Principles of Distributed Database Systems, third edition (2011) with M. Tamer Özsu
* Principles of Distributed Database Systems, fourth edition (2020) with M. Tamer Özsu
* Relational Databases and Knowledge Bases (1988) with Georges Gardarin
* Analysis and Comparison of Relational Database Systems (1989) with Georges Gardarin
* Object Technology: Concepts and Methods (1997) with Mokrane Bouzeghoub and Georges Gardarin

## Awards

Valduriez received the best paper award at the 26th international conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2000) and the best paper award at the 31st international conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2020).
He was awarded the 1993 IBM scientific prize in Computer Science in France and the 2014 Innovation Award from Inria and the French Academy of Science. He has been an ACM Fellow since 2012, an AAIA Fellow since 2024, and a Trustee Emeritus of the VLDB Endowment since 1998.