Hi there 👋

I’m Jan, a software developer and computer scientist (Dr. rer. nat.) specialized in (distributed) databases. I am based in Hamburg, Germany, and have over 20 years of industry experience.

👨‍🔧 My background includes roles as a system administrator, network administrator, software developer, and CTO. In recent years, I have focused primarily on (distributed) databases. Currently, I work as a software engineer, developing a tenant-aware, distributed, and storage/compute-decoupled version of PostgreSQL.
💬 I have presented at international conferences (SSTD, IEEE BigData, CIKM, EDBT, …) and published several peer-reviewed papers. See my Demo Paper, which won the IEEE Best Demo and Short Paper Award at BSD2019, and my recent EDBT paper, which is available open access.
📫 Contact: jnidzwetzki@gmx.de
⚡ Fun fact: My first Linux distribution was SuSE 6.1 (Kernel 2.2.6), which I installed in 1999. My first computer contained a 100 MHz Pentium 1 CPU and 16 MB RAM running Windows 95.

Short Curriculum Vitae

Since 2024 I have been working at Nile, building a tenant-aware, distributed, storage/compute‑decoupled version of PostgreSQL. My work focuses on query routing, planner improvements, and storage decoupling.

From 2022 to 2024 I worked at Timescale as a software engineer on database internals, contributing to TimescaleDB (a time-series extension for PostgreSQL). My work there included planner improvements, adding distributed join support to the multi-node version, improving continuous aggregates, and implementing the first SIMD accelerated functions.

From 2009 to 2022 I studied part-time at FernUniversität in Hagen. I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2012 and a Master of Science in Computer Science in 2014, focusing on operating systems, distributed, and cooperative systems; my master’s thesis was recognized as one of the best of the year by Springer. In 2022 I received a Dr. rer. nat. in Computer Science for a thesis on distributed databases, which was awarded best PhD thesis of the year of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. During that time I focused on database internals and created BBoxDB, a distributed key-bounding-box-value store for multi-dimensional data, developed Distributed SECONDO, and contributed to the SECONDO extensible database system.

From 2002 to 2005 I completed an apprenticeship as an IT specialist for system integration. Between 2006 and 2009 I attended a technical computer science course at the DAA Technical College while working full-time, graduating in 2009 as a Staatlich geprüfter Informatiker (State-Certified Computer Scientist).

For more details, see my LinkedIn profile.

My Interests

Database systems
Operating systems
Distributed, scalable, and fault-tolerant systems
Computer networks
Transactions and parallelism
Economics, financial markets, and algorithmic trading systems

Selected Publications and Talks

Handling Time-Series Data in a Relational DBMS: Challenges and Solution - Keynote at GvDB 2024
BBoxDB: A Distributed Key-Bounding-Box-Value Store - My PhD Thesis
BBoxDB Streams: Scalable Processing of Multi-Dimensional Data Streams - Distributed and Parallel Databases 2022
BBoxDB Streams: Scalable Processing of Multi-Dimensional Data Streams - Technical Report 2021
Distributed Arrays: An Algebra for Generic Distributed Query Processing - Distributed and Parallel Databases 2021 (co-author)
BBoxDB Streams: Distributed Processing of Real-World Streams of Position Data - EDBT 2021 / Slides
BBoxDB: A Distributed and Highly Available Key-Bounding-Box-Value Store - Distributed and Parallel Databases 2020
Demo Paper: Large-Scale Spatial Data Processing With User-Defined Filters in BBoxDB - IEEE Big Spatial Data 2019 / Poster / Slides
BBoxDB - A Scalable Data Store for Multi-Dimensional Big Data - CIKM 2018 / Poster
BBoxDB - A Distributed and Highly Available Key-Bounding-Box-Value Store - Technical Report 2018
Distributed SECONDO: An Extensible and Scalable Database Management System - Distributed and Parallel Databases 2017
Distributed SECONDO: An Extensible, Highly Available, and Scalable Database Management System - Technical Report 2016
Distributed SECONDO: A Highly Available and Scalable System for Spatial Data Processing - SSTD 2015 / Poster
Distributed SECONDO - A Distributed DBMS Based on SECONDO and Apache Cassandra - My Master Thesis
Optimierte Speicherzuteilung an Operatoren in Datenbanksystemen (Optimized Memory Allocation to Operators in Database Systems) - Informatiktage 2013 / Poster
Operator Cost Models for Progress Estimation and Optimization in Database Systems - My Bachelor Thesis

GPG Key

Jan Nidzwetzki jnidzwetzki@gmx.de
Fingerprint: A8FA E105 7812 65C5 7A53 58C9 918E 92F4 0507 962E

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