To stimulate commercial applications and to disseminate scientific research, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam founded MonetDB B.V. This independent company will market software products to enhance societal and economic impact of research results. MonetDB B.V. facilitates the efforts of scientific personnel and stimulates joint ventures in specific market segments.
New spin-off MonetDB B.V.
To stimulate commercial applications and to disseminate scientific research, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam founded MonetDB B.V. in 2008. In 2024 the MonetDB Foundation was launched.
Publication date
16 Sep 2008
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Prof. Martin Kersten, founder and Director of MonetDB B.V. in 2008
A high tech company, on the one hand close to research and on the other at armslength from venture capitalists, is a very good base to facilitate technical innovation.
MonetDB B.V.'s primary task is to control, maintain and spread the open source database management system MonetDB. The system works with SQL and Xquery and was developed at the national research institute CWI. Applications can be found in forensic research, scientific databases (astronomy) and in the world of finance (BI). MonetDB is available on a large number of platforms and can be used through standard interfaces.
Picture, from left to right: founders Peter Boncz, Dick Broekhuis (on behalf of CWI) and Martin Kersten. Not in the photograph are founders Stefan Manegold, Sjoerd Mullender and Niels Nes. (Picture: Nan Tang, CWI)
MonetDB is innovative on all fronts. It is build modularly, it uses an innovative storage model based on vertical fragmentation of data and it offers run-time query optimization. In depth information on these innovations in system design and implementation can be found on the website of MonetDB.
Performance of the system is very good. This is illustrated against the TPC-H benchmark, widely used as a yardstick in the database community. The benchmark, designed by Transaction Processing Council, uses a large dataset questioned with complex queries. A comparative study shows that MonetDB performs much better than her immediate counterparts
