Hamid Pirahesh

An IBM Fellow, ACM Fellow, and Senior Manager at IBM Research at IBM Almaden in San Jose, California, Pirahesh was responsible for the Exploratory Database Department. He managed a team of scientists active in advanced database research. He was a principal member of the Starburst research project, which formed the basis for query compilation in IBM's DB2 Universal Database. He was also an active member of the team that reshaped the entire architectural structure of the DB2 relational query compiler and optimizer.

Pirahesh was a principal member of the original team that designed the query processing architecture of the IBM DB2 UDB relational database management systems (DBMS) and delivered the product to the marketplace. He made major contributions to the query language industry standards and was active in creating new industry standards and database design advancements. He served as an Associate Editor of ACM Computing Surveys and served on the program committee of major computer conferences. He was a member of the IBM Academy, with a focus on analytics at the massive scale on highly scalable servers.

His research areas included cloud computing, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and aggregate data management, query optimization, data warehousing, big data systems (including Hadoop-like map-reduce systems), and management of semi-structured and unstructured data, including NoSQL databases. Pirahesh also served as a consultant to various IBM divisions, including the software division and IBM Global Services. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in the area of database systems.