Career
He has been chairman of the program committee of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGMOD. He also served as an associate editor of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Database Systems. Maier has consulted with Tektronix, Incorporated., Servio Corporation, the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (Master Control Console), Digital Equipment Corporation, Altair, Honeywell, Texas Instruments, International Business Machines Corporation, Microsoft, Informix, Oracle Corporation, National Cash Register, and Object Design, as well as several governmental agencies. He is the author of books on relational databases, logic programming and object-oriented databases, as well as papers in database theory, object-oriented technology and scientific databases.
He is also an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oregon (Honors College, 1974) and a Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science by Princeton University (1978). Maier established some of the earliest results on using the relational model.
Together with his thesis advisor, Jeffrey Ullman, and fellow Princeton students, including Alberto O. Mendelzon and Yehoshua Sagiv, he co-authored a number of influential papers that laid out the fundamental issues and approaches for relational databases. In a now-famous paper (Maier, Mendelzon and Sagiv, TODS 1979), he introduced the chase, a method for testing implication of data dependencies that is now of widespread use in the database theory literature.
This work has been highly influential: it is used, directly or indirectly, on an everyday basis by people who design databases, and it is used in commercial systems to reason about the consistency and correctness of a data design.
New applications of the chase in meta-data management and data exchange are still being discovered. He is credited for coining the term Datalog.
