Richard Thomas Snodgrass (born April 19, 1955) is an American computer scientist and writer and is professor emeritus at the University of Arizona. He is best known for his work on temporal databases, query language design, query optimization and evaluation, storage structures, database design, and ergalics (the science of computing).

Biography

Snodgrass was born on April 19, 1955. He attended Carleton College for a Bachelor of Arts (Physics) and then Carnegie Mellon University for an M.S. as well as a PhD in Computer Science, which he earned in 1982 under the guidance of William Allan Wulf. He has been an ACM Fellow since 1999. He has been a member of the Advisory Board of ACM SIGMOD, of the ACM History Committee, and of the editorial board of ACM Ubiquity. He is married to Merrie Brucks, the Robert and Kathleen Eckert Professor of Marketing Emeritus at the Eller College of Management.

Work

Snodgrass and his doctoral student originated the concept of valid time and transaction time. As of December 2011, ISO/IEC 9075, Database Language SQL:2011 Part 2: SQL/Foundation included clauses in table definitions to define "application-time period tables" (valid-time tables) and "system-versioned tables" (transaction-time tables). TSQL2, a temporal extension to the SQL-92 language standard, was designed by the TSQL2 committee, which was formed in July, 1993. Snodgrass chaired the TSQL2 language design committee. The committee produced a preliminary language specification the following January, which appeared in the March 1994 ACM SIGMOD Record. Various members of the temporal database research community have worked to transfer some of the constructs and insights of TSQL2 into SQL3, termed SQL/Temporal. Snodgrass initiated SQL/Temporal part of the SQL3 draft standard. SQL/Temporal has been partially implemented in Oracle, Teradata version 14, and IBM DB2 10. Snodgrass along with Christian Jensen co-chairs TimeCenter, an international center for the support of temporal database applications on traditional and emerging DBMS technologies. The center has published more than 90 articles since 1997, many of which have been accepted in leading computer science journals.

Association for Computing Machinery

Snodgrass worked as a volunteer for Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) from the mid-1990s. He has chaired the ACM Publications Board and the ACM History Committee and has served on ACM Council. He has chaired the ACM SIGMOD Special Interest Group on Management of Data from 1997 to 2001. In 2001–07, he was Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems. Snodgrass presented to the ACM Council a proposal for "a new ACM service, the ACM Computing Portal," a web-based repository of bibliographic information of all the computing literature. The proposal arrived at a ballpark figure of one million items that captured the entire history of computing, from roughly 1940 to 2000. The ACM Portal, also called the ACM Guide, was released to the public on May 21, 2003. This resource was later expanded into the ACM Digital Library, which has opened for public access more than 100,000 scientific articles from 1951 through 2000. As the chair of the ACM Publications Board, Snodgrass developed a strategic vision for the Association for Computing Machinery to become the preferred publisher for computer science and proposed a far-ranging policy that recognizes the rights and responsibilities of readers, authors, reviewers, editors and libraries.

Publications

Snodgrass is the author or editor of several books including: Snodgrass has written more than 90 refereed articles in the following areas: