Sergey Melnik is a Principal Engineer at Databricks.

Prior to that he was at AWS working on Amazon Aurora. Before that at Sergey spent 15 years at Google. He worked on query processing and storage in Spanner, a planet-scale transactional system that powers most of Google services and is available as a Cloud product. Before that, he led the development of the data analysis system called Dremel that was made publicly available as BigQuery, is a fully-managed, serverless data warehouse. His work on Dremel led to a VLDB Test of Time Award while Spanner was recognized by a SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award and SIGMOD Systems Award.

Before joining Google, Sergey was a researcher in the Database Group at Microsoft Research (2003-2008) working on data integration and data programmability with Phil Bernstein. Sergey was as a visiting researcher in the Stanford Database Group (1999-2002) working with Prof. Garcia-Molina and Prof. Wiederhold, and served as an invited expert at the World-Wide Web Consortium.

Sergey received best paper awards at SIGMOD, ICDE and OSDI conferences, 10-year Most Influential Paper Award from ICDE, and a best dissertation award from the German C.S. Society. He got an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Leipzig, Germany. 

Selected publications

• • Dremel: A Decade of Interactive SQL Analysis at Web Scale. Invited paper for the VLDB'20 Test of Time Award (recorded talk). The award for given for the VLDB'10 paper:

  • Dremel: Interactive Analysis of Web-Scale Datasets, with A. Gubarev, J. J. Long, G. Romer, S. Shivakumar, M. Tolton, and T. Vassilakis. VLDB'10 (slides). Invited article in CACM Research Highlights, prefaced with Technical Perspective by Mike Franklin.

  • The Seattle Report on Database Research, with D. Abadi, A. Ailamaki, D. Andersen, P. Bailis, M. Balazinska, P. A. Bernstein, P. A. Boncz, S. Chaudhuri, A. Cheung, A. Doan, L. Dong, M. J. Franklin, J. Freire, A. Y. Halevy, J. M. Hellerstein, S. Idreos, D. Kossmann, T. Kraska, S. Krishnamurthy, V. Markl, T. Milo, C. Mohan, T. Neumann, B. C. Ooi, F. Ozcan, J. Patel, A. Pavlo, R. A. Popa, R. Ramakrishnan, C. Ré, M. Stonebraker, D. Suciu. SIGMOD Rec. 48(4): 44-53 (2019)

  • Spanner: Becoming a SQL System, with D. Bacon, N. Bales, N. Bruno, B. Cooper, A. Dickinson, A. Fikes, C. Fraser, A. Gubarev, M. Joshi, E. Kogan, A. Lloyd, C. Taylor, R. Rao, D. Shue, M. van der Holst, and D. Woodford. SIGMOD'17

  • Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database, with J. Corbett, J. Dean, M. Epstein, C. Frost, J. Furman, S. Ghemawat, A. Gubarev, C. Heiser, P. Hochschild, W. Hsieh, S. Kanthak, E. Kogan, H. Li, A. Lloyd, D. Mwaura, D. Nagle, S. Quinlan, R. Rao, L. Rolig, Y. Saito, M. Szymaniak, C. Taylor, R. Wang, and D. Woodford. OSDI'12 (Best Paper, SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award)

  • Compiling Mappings to Bridge Applications and Databases, with A. Adya and P.A. Bernstein. SIGMOD'07 (Best Paper),  journal version (TODS'08)

Selected talks

• • Dremel: A Decade of Interactive SQL Analysis at Web Scale. VLDB'20 Test of Time Award talk

  • Spanner's SQL Evolution, Data@Scale 2017, Seattle (pdf)

  • A Decade after Flooding, 10-year Most Influential Paper Award Talk at ICDE'13 for the Similarity Flooding paper published at ICDE'02

  • The Frontiers of Data Programmability,  Keynote at the German database conference (BTW'09), Münster

Recent program committee service

• • VLDB'26, SIGMOD'26, SIGMOD'25, SIGMOD'24

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