Yoav Raz

Yoav Raz (, born 1947, Haifa, Israel) is a computer scientist. He has worked primarily in the area of Information technology, and conducted research mainly in Data management (Databases in particular). He was Chief Scientist at EMC Corporation (1994-2003).
Yoav Raz is the inventor of Commitment ordering a years old practical fundamental open problem in concurrency control of database management systems: . With the proliferation of Multi-core processors Raz's generic local CO algorithm has also been increasingly utilized in Concurrent programming, Transactional memory, and especially in Software transactional memory (STM) for achieving serializability optimistically.
He is also the inventor of other patents and the author of academic articles. Since 1986 he has mainly resided in the USA.
Yoav Raz received his academic degrees, B.Sc. (1969), M.Sc. (1973), and D.Sc. (1979), from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. He studied for his B.Sc while serving in the Atuda (academic reserve program of the Israel Defense Forces) after graduating the Leo Baeck high-school in Haifa (1965), and before his military service (1970-1975).
Work history
Dr. Raz is Senior partner at Raz consulting (since 2003).
Previously he was Chief Scientist at EMC Corporation (Computer data storage and related technologies; reporting to Moshe Yanai; nine years), and this after holding the position of Software architect at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC; Transaction processing - Technology, Architecture, and Standards Group, and a representative at ANSI and ISO/OSI; six years). Before this he was Co-founder and Managing director at Sitav Ltd. (an information technology consultancy, systems developer, and software companies representative in Israel; ten years).
He also held academic positions (with partial overlap): Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD; total of three years), and before this Senior lecturer at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (seven years).
Research
Major published results with practical applications:
Commitment ordering
also called Commit ordering (CO)
:See also Transactional locking in Software transactional memory
In 1990, while at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Yoav Raz discovered Commitment ordering (Commit ordering; CO), a Serializability implying database schedule property, and invented related effective interoperable concurrency control techniques for guaranteeing Serializability, Distributed serializability, and Global serializability).
Yoav Raz is also the developer of the underlying Theory of Commitment ordering (now a substantial part of Serializability Theory), which explains CO's properties and mechanisms' correctness. CO (including its special case SS2PL) is potentially (and probably) the for the emerging Cloud computing.
General theory of multi-version concurrency control
:See ' in Commitment ordering
:and Making Snapshot Isolation Serializable in Snapshot isolation
Raz also developed a new, revised General theory of multi-version concurrency control, which is a natural generalization of the common single-version concurrency control theory. This theory has allowed to define (MVCO) for the first time, to make single-version CO (the common CO) a special case of (the generalizing) MVCO. It also allows a unified handling of both single and multi-version database objects, and the transparent inter-operation among their respective concurrency control methods. The new element in the theory is the way conflicts are defined.
The new theory has been utilized (without CO) also for analyzing and enhancing the popular multi-version based Snapshot Isolation (SI) concurrency control method to make it serializable. It is referenced in related publications, e.g., (Cahill et al. 2008), and explicitly outlined in a presentation in (Fekete 2009) which summarizes years of research on making SI serializable.
The dynamic two-phase commit protocol
Yoav Raz coined the name Dynamic Two-Phase Commitment Protocol (D2PC) and proved the protocol's time optimality (fastest commit possible of each distributed transaction's participant by dynamically letting the commit coordinator to be chosen optimally at the location of collision of racing protocol messages (votes) over the transaction's communication tree). He took part (in 1992-3, as the US (ANSI) head of delegation, with all the major computer companies participating) in the standardization process of D2PC by the ISO-IEC/JTC1/OSI-DTP&CCR groups in a project on commitment optimizations (commit optimizations) for their respective standards (the original underlying communication standards for the de-facto standard X/Open DTP and the origins of its model).
Preparatory operations for B-tree concurrency control
Yoav Raz coined the term Preparatory Operations for the concurrency control of B-trees (a common database indexing method; specifically: the B -tree () variant), demonstrated these operations within a concurrency control protocol, and showed its performance advantage over previously known protocols.
ERROL and RRA
Yoav Raz is co-developer of ERROL- an Entity Relationship Role Oriented Language, developed and implemented together with his graduate students at Technion and UCSD. The essence of ERROL is based on the M.Sc. project of Victor M. Markowitz. ERROL is a declarative database language over the Entity-Relationship Model (ERM) that mimics Natural language constructs (specifically, the English language, however other natural languages can be used as well). ERROL's expressions look like, and usually are identical to Natural language sentences. ERROL's semantics and processing are defined by an underlying Reshaped relational algebra (RRA) with relational operators that bear analogies to major Natural language constructs. RRA has been developed by Victor Markowitz in conjunction with the development of ERROL and later has been reformulated by Yoav Raz. Being close to natural languages, ERROL allows a relatively convenient for humans formulation of complex database queries, and can be a foundation for convenient to use data management languages.
Yoav Raz and his students Victor M. Markowitz and Reuven Cohen won for ERROL the 1984 Computer Science Award by [http://www.ila.org.il/Index.asp?CategoryID134&ArticleID92 ILA - The Israeli Information Technology Association].
Awards
* Second prize in the Annual Modeling and Inventions Contest by the Weizmann Institute of Science (1964; for Working Model of a Summation Unit in a Digital Computer, based on combined with Computer memory)
* First prize in the National Annual Grossman Mathematics Olympiad by the Technion (1965; the first (established 1960) and only Math Olympiad in Israel at that time).
*Annual best paper award by ILA (1977; for the article "CMIS - Capital Management Information System for Concerns"; together with Isaac Bussel).
* The computer science award by [http://www.ila.org.il/Index.asp?CategoryID134&ArticleID92 ILA - The Israeli Information Technology Association] (1984; for ERROL and its implementation; together with Victor M. Markowitz and Reuven Cohen).

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