Alberto O. Mendelzon

Who is Alberto O. Mendelzon?

Alberto O. Mendelzon was an Argentine-Canadian computer scientist who died on June 16, 2005.

Alberto Mendelzon was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He received a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1979, where his advisor was Jeffrey Ullman. After that he was a post-doctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for a year before joining the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1980.

He was one of the pioneers who helped to lay the foundations of relational databases. His early work on database dependencies has been influential in both the theory and practice of data management. He has made fundamental contributions in the areas of graphical query languages, knowledge-base systems, and on-line analytic processing. His work has provided the foundation for languages used to query the structure of the web.

Mendelzon established some of the earliest results on using the relational data model. Together with his thesis advisor, Jeffrey Ullman, and fellow Princeton students, including David Maier and Yeshoshua Sagiv, he co-authored a number of influential papers that laid out the fundamental issues and approaches for relational databases.