Curt Kolovson

PostgreSQL Contributor at Self

About

I was a member of the original Postgres research project at UC Berkeley from 1986-1990 when I was a PhD student. My PhD advisor was Prof. Michael Stonebraker. My claim to fame is that I implemented the first version of the Postgres Vacuum Daemon. At that time, one key feature of Postgres was to be a no-overwrite data store that contained past states of tuples (historical data), in order to support "time travel". The idea was that historical data would be maintained in Postgres up to some user-specified time in the past, and data older than that would be periodically "vacuumed" to write-once read-many (WORM) optical drives, which were new at the time. As everyone knows, the historical data feature of Postgres was eventually dropped, and vacuuming took on a different purpose to reduce data bloat through MVCC garbage collection. My PhD thesis topic was "Indexing Techniques for Multidimensional Spatial Data and Historical Data in Database Management Systems", and I had two papers published during my PhD years. They were:

  • Curtis P. Kolovson and Michael Stonebraker, "Segment Indexes: Dynamic Indexing Techniques for Multi-Dimensional Interval Data". SIGMOD Conference 1991: 138-147.
  • Curtis P. Kolovson and Michael Stonebraker, "Indexing Techniques for Historical Databases". ICDE 1989: 127-137.

My career in industry consisted of working at AT&T Bell Labs, HP, VMware, and MariaDB. I am currently an advisor to startups and a PostgreSQL Consultant / Contributor.

Curt Kolovson has presented the following presentations