Patrick Eugene O'Neil (1942 – September 20, 2019) was an American computer scientist, an expert on

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

s, and a professor of computer science at the

University of Massachusetts Boston The University of Massachusetts Boston (stylized as UMass Boston) is a public research university in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the only public research university in Boston and the third-largest campus in the five-campus University of Massa ...

.Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2010-11-26. O'Neil did his undergraduate studies at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

, receiving a B.S. in mathematics in 1963. After earning a master's degree at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, he moved to

Rockefeller University The Rockefeller University is a private biomedical research and graduate-only university in New York City, New York. It focuses primarily on the biological and medical sciences and provides doctoral and postdoctoral education. It is classif ...

, where he earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics in 1969 under the supervision of

Gian-Carlo Rota Gian-Carlo Rota (April 27, 1932 – April 18, 1999) was an Italian-American mathematician and philosopher. He spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in combinatorics, functional analysis, proba ...

. He was an assistant professor at MIT from 1970 to 1972, but then left academia for industry, returning in 1988 as a member of the UMass/Boston faculty. He became a full professor in 1996. He wrote highly cited papers on replication in

distributed database A distributed database is a database in which data is stored across different physical locations. It may be stored in multiple computers located in the same physical location (e.g. a data centre); or maybe dispersed over a network of interconnect ...

s, page replacement strategies for databases,. SQL isolation, and database indexing strategies. With Elizabeth O'Neil, he is the author of the database textbook ''Database Principles, Programming, and Performance'' (Morgan Kaufmann, 2nd ed., 2000). O'Neil published the algorithms of the bitmap indices he found working in the CCA Model 204

DBMS In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases ...

in the mid-1980s, and implemented

B-tree In computer science, a B-tree is a self-balancing tree data structure that maintains sorted data and allows searches, sequential access, insertions, and deletions in logarithmic time. The B-tree generalizes the binary search tree, allowing for ...

for that database. This work was first published in 1987. O’Neil invented the Log-Structured Merge Tree (LSM Tree) along with Dieter Gawlick and Edward Cheng in 1991 while spending the summer at Gawlick's database research group at

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president un ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

. The resulting paper, published in 1996, also included a performance analysis by Elizabeth O'Neil. This access method supports very fast inserts without hobbling lookup times, and now underlies many

NoSQL A NoSQL (originally referring to "non- SQL" or "non-relational") database provides a mechanism for storage and retrieval of data that is modeled in means other than the tabular relations used in relational databases. Such databases have existed ...

data stores, such as

Bigtable Bigtable is a fully managed wide-column and key-value NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads as part of the Google Cloud portfolio. History Bigtable development began in 2004.. It is now used by a number of Googl ...

, HBase, LevelDB, SQLite4,

Tarantool Tarantool is an in-memory computing platform with a flexible data schema, best used for creating high-performance applications. Two main parts of it are an in-memory database and a Lua application server. Tarantool maintains data in memory an ...

RocksDB RocksDB is a high performance embedded database for key-value data. It is a fork of Google's LevelDB optimized to exploit many CPU cores, and make efficient use of fast storage, such as solid-state drives (SSD), for input/output (I/O) bound wo ...

WiredTiger WiredTiger is a NoSQL, Open Source extensible platform for data management. It is released under version 2 or 3 of the GNU General Public License. WiredTiger uses MultiVersion Concurrency Control ( MVCC) architecture. MongoDB MongoDB is a sour ...

Apache Cassandra Cassandra is a free and open-source, distributed, wide-column store, NoSQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. Cassand ...

InfluxDB InfluxDB is an open-source time series database (TSDB) developed by the company InfluxData. It is written in the Go programming language for storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metr ...

, and ScyllaDB.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Oneil, Patrick American computer scientists Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni University of Chicago alumni Rockefeller University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty University of Massachusetts Boston faculty 1942 births 2019 deaths