MonetDB

MonetDB is an open source column-oriented database management system developed at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands. It was designed to provide high performance on complex queries against large databases, such as combining tables with hundreds of columns and multi-million rows. MonetDB has been applied in high-performance applications for online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, GIS,RDF, text retrieval and sequence alignment processing.

History

Data mining projects in the 1990s required improved analytical database support. This resulted in a CWI spin-off called Data Distilleries, which used early MonetDB implementations in its analytical suite. Data Distilleries eventually became a subsidiary of SPSS in 2003, which in turn was acquired by IBM in 2009.

MonetDB in its current form was first created in 2002 by doctoral student Peter Alexander Boncz and professor Martin L. Kersten as part of the 1990s MAGNUM research project at University of Amsterdam. It was initially called simply Monet, after the French impressionist painter Claude Monet. The first version under an open-source software license (a modified version of the Mozilla Public License) was released on September 30, 2004. When MonetDB version 4 was released into the open-source domain and many extensions to the code base were added by the MonetDB/CWI team. These included a new SQL frontend, supporting the SQL:2003 standard.