Distinguished Database Authority Andy Pavlo Joins Fauna as Technical Advisor

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., April 25, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Fauna, provider of the groundbreaking distributed OLTP database FaunaDB, announced today that Dr. Andy Pavlo, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, has joined the company as Technical Advisor. Dr. Pavlo is an authority on database management systems. At Fauna, he joins notable database expert Daniel Abadi, Darnell-Kanal Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, in helping Fauna pursue its mission to build a globally distributed database for the emerging digital enterprise.

Dr. Pavlo's research background is in database management systems, specifically main memory systems, self-driving/autonomous architectures, transaction processing systems, and large-scale data analytics. He has published more than 60 papers with approximately 4,000 citations. His Ph.D. dissertation, "Scalable Transaction Execution in Partitioned Main Memory Database Management Systems," won the ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award in 2014, the highest award given to a Ph.D. dissertation in the database research community.

"Andy is a world-renowned database visionary. We are thrilled to have his insight and guidance as we continue to evolve FaunaDB, which was recently proved to offer the strongest consistency guarantees for distributed and cloud environments by the independent firm Jepsen," said Evan Weaver, CEO of Fauna. "With Andy and Daniel as technical advisors, we now have two of the top database experts in the world supporting and guiding our development efforts. Given Andy's expertise in efficient query processing systems and our initiative with polyglot APIs, we look forward to collaborating with him on advanced techniques in distributed SQL in FaunaDB."

"I am impressed with the work Fauna has done in developing and delivering a distributed database based on Dr. Abadi's groundbreaking research on Calvin," said Pavlo. "FaunaDB combines the flexibility and agility of first-generation NoSQL systems combined with the strong transactional reliability guarantees of enterprise relational DBMSs. To be sure, this is not an easy engineering feat. Its use of Calvin's deterministic concurrency control protocol to maintain consistency is unique to the industry and solves the notoriously difficult challenges of operating in multi-cloud environments."

Dr. Pavlo regularly serves on the program committees of top-tier database conferences, including as an Associate Editor for both VLDB and SIGMOD. Additionally, he has received several other awards, including the NSF CAREER (2019), Sloan Fellowship (2018), ACM SIGMOD Best Paper (2018), and commendations as a distinguished reviewer for VLDB (2018) and SIGMOD (2017, 2018).

The appointment of Dr. Pavlo as a Technical Advisor to Fauna comes at a time when the company is seeing greater adoption of FaunaDB among industry leaders in financial services, ecommerce, gaming, and SaaS. Additionally, Fauna has achieved significant milestones that demonstrate its market momentum. Earlier this month, Fauna announced expansion of its query interface with market-leading standard APIs, including GraphQL, CQL, and SQL, to further boost developer productivity and enable migration of SQL and Cassandra-based apps to the cloud. And earlier this year, FaunaDB demonstrated its unique ability to offer strictly serializable transactions in geographically distributed environments without placing limits on the number of keys or regions, through an exhaustive study conducted by independent testing firm Jepsen. The report conclusively showed that FaunaDB offers unmatched resilience that is critical for delivering the highest quality customer experience – a key requirement for businesses undergoing digital transformation.

About Fauna
FaunaDB is the Relational NoSQL database that guarantees data correctness without operational complexity. Scalable, secure, transactional, global, multi-cloud, multi-tenant, temporal, and highly available, FaunaDB is designed to support digital enterprises in the 21st century and beyond. Vertical industry leaders in financial services, ecommerce, gaming, and SaaS have deployed FaunaDB to support identity management, distributed ledgers, shared services, mobile APIs, and other use cases. Founded in 2012 by the team that scaled Twitter, Fauna is based in San Francisco and Boston, and funded by Point72 Ventures, CRV, Data Collective, and Quest Venture Partners, with strategic investment from GV (formerly Google Ventures, a division of Alphabet), Capital One Growth Ventures, and LINE Corporation. For more information visit fauna.com or follow us at @fauna.

SOURCE Fauna, Inc.

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