Education
Professor DeWitt received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Colgate University in 1970, and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1976.
Professor DeWitt received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Colgate University in 1970, and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1976.
He then joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison and started the Wisconsin Database Group, which he led for more than 30 years. Professor DeWitt is known for his research in the areas of parallel databases, benchmarking, object-oriented databases, and eXtensible Markup Language databases. In 2009, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recognized the seminal contributions of his Gamma parallel database system project with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Software System Award.
Currently, he is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, leading the Microsoft Jim Gray Systems Laboratory at Madison, Wisconsin.
Several commercial database vendors include an end-user license agreement provision, known as the DeWitt Clause, that prohibits researchers and scientists from explicitly using the names of their systems in academic papers. In essence, a DeWitt Clause forbids the publication of database benchmarks that the database vendor has not sanctioned.
The original DeWitt Clause was established by Oracle at the behest of Larry Ellison. Ellison was displeased with a benchmark study done by David DeWitt in 1982, then just an assistant professor, using his new Wisconsin Benchmark, which showed that Oracle"s system had poor performance.
He is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (1998), and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.