2008 SIGMOD Contributions Award
Klaus R. Dittrich

Klaus R. Dittrich is the recipient of the 2008 SIGMOD Contributions Award for his lifetime dedication and service to the database community, most notably, sustained and excellent work in the VLDB Endowment, leadership for the VLDB Journal, and promotion of interaction between the database and software engineering communities.

Klaus R. Dittrich, who passed away on November 20, 2007, was a tireless and unselfish organizer and promoter of database research, both within the community and across its boundaries. He served on numerous committees and boards within ACM and other professional organizations, including the positions of the program committee co-chair of VLDB 1997, CAiSE 2001, and ICDE 2002. Dittrich served many years on the VLDB Endowment's Board of Trustees, the steering committee of the VLDB conference series; from 1998 to 2003 he was the board's secretary, probably the most work-intensive position on the VLDB executive. From 2005, he was an editor-in-chief of the VLDB Journal, one of the flagship journals of the database community, and a major contributor to the journal's great success in terms of citation rate and impact factor.

Dittrich was one of the early minds behind object-oriented databases and an ardent promoter of this influential technology. He co-authored the manifesto on object-oriented databases, a highly influential paper with more than 700 citations. He worked on important applications of object-oriented data management in computer-aided design and software engineering. Dittrich was very active in the research communities on both database systems and software engineering, and he was a strong and very successful advocate of interaction and cross-fertilization between these two communities.