C.

Mohan
In this Tamil Indian name, the initial C. stands for Chandrasekaran, the name of the father of this person. In this
patronymic naming scheme, where the concept of family
name doesn't exist, the person should be referred to by
the given name, Mohan.

Big Data and Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) enhancements to DB2 and Apache Spark.
He has been giving numerous keynote and other talks
on NoSQL, NewSQL, modern enhancements to classic
RDBMSs and Big Data.[7]

C. Mohan is an Indo-American computer scientist. He

was born on 3 August 1955 in Tamil Nadu, India.[1] After
growing up there and nishing his undergraduate studies in Chennai, he moved to the United States in 1977
for graduate studies. After having been an Indian citizen
from birth, since 2007 he has been an American citizen
and an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI). Currently, he
is an IBM Fellow based at the IBM Almaden Research
Center (San Jose, California).[2]

Mohan has published numerous conference and journal

papers in the areas of database, workow and transaction
management.[8][9][10][11] According to Google Scholar,
his h-index is 54 and his i10-index is 85.[11] He is
the primary inventor of the ARIES family of recovery
and concurrency control methods,[12] and the industrystandard (e.g., X/Open XA) Presumed Abort commit
protocol.[13][14] His journal papers on ARIES[15] and Presumed Abort[16] are by now considered classic papers
in the areas of transactions, recovery, distributed commit and locking,[17] and are included in a collection[18]
of database papers, informally called the Red Book,
edited by ACM Turing Award winner Prof. Michael
Stonebraker and others under a section titled Techniques
Everyone Should Know. In the introduction to that section, one of the editors of the Red Book, Peter Bailis,
while discussing the ARIES paper, has said In graduate
database courses, this paper is a rite of passage. However, this material is fundamental, so it is important to
understand. In the ACM SIGMOD Record series called
Reminiscences on Inuential Papers, with reference to
the ARIES paper, Prof. Betty Salzberg of Northeastern
University has said: The ARIES paper was important
for me because it enabled me to envision the mechanisms of recovery in database systems clearly. ... Reading the ARIES paper inuenced much of my subsequent
research. ... Now it is almost impossible for me to imagine thinking of a database system without ARIES style
recovery.[19] Prof. Alan Fekete of University of Sydney, as part of the abstract of a keynote talk by him in
February 1993 said the following: In the past few years,
there have been several exciting advances in transaction
management that seem certain to inuence future commercial systems. One is the invention and publication of
improved techniques for implementation of transaction
management. In particular, an exciting series of papers
have come from the ARIES project led by C. Mohan at
IBM Almaden Research Laboratory. There are new algorithms which provide concurrency control for B-tree indices, recovery compatible with ne-grained locking, and
concurrency control allowing long-running audits.[20]

Education

Mohan received his PhD in computer science from the

University of Texas at Austin in 1981. He received a
B.Tech. in chemical engineering from IIT Madras in
1977. He had his pre-college education in Vellore, Tamil
Nadu.

Career

Immediately after nishing his PhD in the database area

in December 1981, Mohan joined the birthplace of
relational databases and SQL, namely IBM Research in
San Jose, as a Research Sta Member, and worked on
projects like R*, Starburst, Exotica, and DBCache.[3]
15 years after he joined IBM, in June 1997, IBM CEO
Louis V. Gerstner Jr. named him an IBM Fellow, IBMs
highest technical position for being recognized worldwide as a leading innovator in transaction management.[4]
During June 1998 to July 1999, while being on an IBM
sabbatical, he worked as a Visiting Scientist at Frances
premier computer science research institute INRIA Rocquencourt, in the suburbs of Paris. It is the same place
where, while being a PhD student at UT Austin, he had
done an internship in the SIRIUS project during the summer of 1979!
From June 2006 until January 2009, he worked as the
IBM India Chief Scientist, based in Bangalore.[5]

Mohan has worked closely with many IBM product

Since his return to IBM Almaden Research Center at groups worldwide and his research results have been imthe end of his India assignment, Mohan has worked plemented in numerous IBM and non-IBM prototypes,
on projects relating to Storage Class Memories,[6] and
1

REFERENCES

and products like IBM DB2, MQSeries,[21] IBM Web- says: He has played a key role in establishing the foundaSphere, Informix, Cloudscape, IBM Notes, Microsoft tions of database systems, which are at the core of modSQL Server and IBM System z Parallel Sysplex.[22]
ern information infrastructure, that support modern sociIn a 2003 interview conducted by Marianne Winslett ety. His work is among the lessons taught to students of
as part of the ACM SIGMOD Distinguished Database database systems across the world. He has won numerous
Proles[23] series, Mohan has discussed the rst 20 awards and holds key patents. It is rare for the work of
years of his IBM career. Video and audio record- one person to have had such a signicant research, comings, and the textual transcript of that interview were mercial and societal impact.
published.[3][24][25] That interview provides a historical
perspective on the state of the database research and
products landscape then and also on Computer Science
work in India. It also discusses Mohans most important research results and how they came about. A
Chinese translation of this interviews transcript is also
available.[26]
Mohan has stayed a technologist during his entire 34
years professional career and has avoided becoming a
manager! He often talks about the importance of longterm technical careers with sustained focus in one area to
attain excellence and to be eective in innovation.[27][28]
Especially in a developing country like India, during his
IBM India Chief Scientist assignment as well as at other
times, he has often emphasized the need for good technical people to stay technical and not be too attracted
by a management career path.[29] In a front-page story
back in August 2007, Business Standard, one of Indias
leading newspapers, discussed Mohans senior most technical position at IBM and elaborated on his patenting
activities.[30]

From IBM, Mohan has received 2 Corporate and 8 Outstanding Innovation/Technical Achievement Awards. He
is an inventor on 47 issued/pending patents[41][42][43] and
was named an IBM Master Inventor in 1997.

4 Professional Contributions
Mohan has discussed his IBM and non-IBM professional activities in and outside Silicon Valley in a short
video.[44] He is a frequent speaker in North America,
Western Europe and India, and has given talks in 40
countries.[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52]

Mohan has been on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum

and an editor of VLDB Journal, and Distributed and Parallel Databases. Currently, he is a Steering Council member of IBMs Software Group Architecture Board, and
a member of IBMs Technical Leadership Team (TLT),
IBM Academy of Technology, and Information Management Architecture Board. In the past, he has been a member of IBMs Research Management Council (RMC),
IBM Indias Senior Leadership Team, the IBM Asset Architecture Board, and the Bharti and Vodafone Technical
Advisory Councils. He has also served on the Academic
3 Awards
Senate of the International Institute of Information TechMohans research, publications, inventions and technol- nology (IIIT) at Bangalore.
ogy transfer contributions have been well appreciated
both inside and outside IBM over the decades via numer5 Papers
ous awards and other recognition.
In February 2009, Mohan was elected to the United
States National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for
contributions to locking and recovery algorithms for
database systems.[31][32][33] During the same year, he
was also elected as a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE).[34] He received
the 1996 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in recognition of his innovative contributions to the development and use of database systems. In 2002, he was
named an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. At the
1999 International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
(VLDB), he was honored with the 10 Year Best Paper
Award[35][36] for the widespread commercial and research
impact of his ARIES work which has been widely covered in textbooks[37][38] and university courses.
In 2003, Mohan was named a Distinguished Alumnus
of his undergraduate alma mater IIT Madras.[39] In discussing Mohans accomplishments, that award citation[40]

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~{}cs223/papers/
p371-mohan.pdf

6 References
[1] Life Events. Facebook. Retrieved 17 June 2016.
[2] Biodata of Dr. C. Mohan. IBM Almaden Research Center. IBM. Retrieved 17 June 2016.
[3] Winslett, Marianne (December 2004). C. Mohan Speaks
Out on R*, Message Queues, Computer Science in India,
How ARIES Came About, Life as an IBM Fellow, and
More (PDF). SIGMOD Record 33 (4): 7784. Retrieved
19 June 2016.
[4] IBM Fellows Directory. IBM. Retrieved 17 June 2016.
[5] Dr. C. Mohan appointed as IBM Indias Chief Scientist.
CNBC TV18 MoneyControl. Retrieved 17 June 2016.

[6] Implications of Storage Class Memories (SCMs) on Software Architecture - Video of Keynote Talk by Dr. C.
Mohan. Non-Volatile Memories Workshop, March 2011.
University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Retrieved
24 June 2016.
[7] C. Mohans An In-Depth Look at Modern Database
Systems & Big Data: Hype and Reality"". Retrieved
24 June 2016.
[8] List of computer science publications by C. Mohan.
Universitat Trier. Retrieved 17 June 2016.
[9] Research papers by C. Mohan and citations. Microsoft.
Retrieved 17 June 2016.
[10] ResearchGate Prole - C. Mohan. ResearchGate. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[11] C. Mohans Google Scholar Prole. Google Scholar.
Google. Retrieved 3 July 2016.
[12] Repeating History Beyond ARIES (PDF). C. Mohan,
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Very
Large Data Bases, Edinburgh, UK, September 1999.
[13] Mohan, C.; Lindsay, Bruce. Ecient Commit Protocols
for the Tree of Processes Model of Distributed Transactions. Proc. 2nd ACM Symposium on Principles of
Distributed Computing (PODC), Montreal, Canada, August
1983. ACM.
[14] Bernstein, Philip; Newcomer, Eric (2009). Principles of
Transaction Processing (2nd ed.). Morgan Kaufmann.
[15] Mohan, C.; Haderle, Donald; Lindsay, Bruce; Pirahesh,
Hamid; Schwarz, Peter (March 1992). ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method Supporting Fine-Granularity
Locking and Partial Rollbacks Using Write-Ahead Logging. ACM Transactions on Database Systems 17 (1):
94162.
[16] Mohan, C.; Lindsay, Bruce; Obermarck, Ron (December
1986). Transaction Management in the R* Distributed
Database Management System. ACM Transactions on
Database Systems 11 (4): 378396.
[17] ARIES Family of Locking and Recovery Algorithms.
Archived from the original on August 19, 2012. Retrieved
21 June 2016.
[18] Bailis, Peter; Hellerstein, Joseph; Stonebraker, Michael
(2015). Readings in Database Systems (PDF) (5th ed.).
Retrieved 20 June 2016.
[19] Snodgrass, Richard (March 1998). Reminiscences on
Inuential Papers (PDF). ACM SIGMOD Record 27 (1).
Retrieved 21 June 2016.
[20] Fekete, Alan. Recent Advances in Transaction Management - Keynote. Google Groups: comp.databases.theory.
ADC '93: Fourth Australian Database Conference. Retrieved 21 June 2016.
[21] WebSphere MQ: A 15-Year Evolution to Todays System
z. Enterprise Systems z/Journal, 19 August 2008. Retrieved 23 June 2016.

[22] Innovation Runs Deep in IBM Fellows. IBM Building

a Smarter Planet - Smarter Planet Blog, 15 April 2015.
Retrieved 18 June 2016.
[23] Distinguished Proles in Databases Interview. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest
Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD). Retrieved 22
June 2016.
[24] Video Recording of C. Mohans Distinguished Proles in
Databases Interview by Marianne Winslett. Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group
on Management of Data (SIGMOD). Retrieved 22 June
2016.
[25] Audio Recording of C. Mohans Distinguished Proles in
Databases Interview by Marianne Winslett. Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group
on Management of Data (SIGMOD). Retrieved 22 June
2016.
[26] C.Mohan
R*
,
IBM
C.Mohan
June 2016.

,ARIES
,
" (PDF). Retrieved 23

[27] ooNee Studios (2016-05-17), C Mohan Interview at

TiETV Lounge #ooneeapp @TiEcon 2016 @SeeMohan
#DataEconomy, retrieved 2016-06-19
[28] Can Turkey transform into an innovative economy?, Ismet
Berkan, Hurriyet Daily News, 1 August 2015, retrieved
2016-06-18
[29] India yet to reach the height of technical work, The Hindu,
29 December 2009, retrieved 2016-06-21
[30] Indian techies log in to elite global R&D. Business Standard, 3 August 2007. Retrieved 18 June 2016.
[31] National Academy of Engineering Elects 65 Members and
Nine Foreign Associates, National Academy of Engineering, 6 February 2009, retrieved 2016-06-18
[32] 10 Indians in elite US engineering body. Redi India
Abroad. 17 March 2009. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[33] NAE Members Directory - Dr. C. Mohan. National
Academy of Engineering. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[34] Engineering Section - II (Computer and Information
Technology)". Indian National Academy of Engineering.
Retrieved 21 June 2016.
[35] VLDB 1999: 10-Year Award. Universitat Trier. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[36] VLDB 1999. Universitat Trier. Retrieved 17 June
2016.
[37] Ramakrishnan, Raghu; Gehrke, Johannes (2003).
Database Management Systems (3rd ed.). United States:
McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0072465631.
[38] Elmasri, Ramez; Navathe, Shamkant (2010). Fundamentals of Database Systems (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River,
N.J.: Pearson. ISBN 978-0136086208.

[39] A happy homecoming for IIT alumni, The Hindu, 31 December 2003, retrieved 2016-06-18
[40] Distinguished Alumnus Awardees - 2003. IIT Madras
Oce of Alumni Relations. Retrieved 17 June 2016.
[41] Results of Search in US Patent Collection db for:
IN/mohan-chandrasekaran. USPTO Patent Full-Text and
Image Database. United States Patent and Trademark Ofce (USPTO). Retrieved 23 June 2016.
[42] Results of Search in AppFT Database for: IN/mohanchandrasekaran. Patent Application Full Text and Image
Database. United States Patent and Trademark Oce
(USPTO). Retrieved 23 June 2016.
[43] IBM as the applicant AND Chandrasekaran Mohan as
the inventor - Results List. EspaceNet Patent Search. European Patent Oce. Retrieved 23 June 2016.
[44] Dr. C. Mohan, IBM Almaden Research Center Fellow,
talks about his passion for the real-world impact of IBM
research. EdCast 2.5 Minutes Video. Retrieved 19 June
2016.
[45] List of 50+ seminars given by C. Mohan in 18 countries during his sabbatical (6/98-7/99) at INRIA (Rocquencourt)". IBM. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[46] Dr. C. Mohan to give Keynote Address at FOMAAs Science and Technology Seminar. India Tribune. 30 June
2010. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[47] CEMSE Deans Distinguished Lecture: IBM Global
Technology Outlook (GTO) 2014 by Dr. C. Mohan.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
(KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[48] AMW 2014 - Alberto Mendelzon International Workshop on Foundations of Data Management: Invited
Speakers. Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[49] Modern Data Management Systems Summit at Tsinghua
University. Institute of Data Science, Tsinghua University. Retrieved 22 June 2016.
[50] WSO2Con 2011, Colombo, Sri Lanka: IBM Global
Technology Outlook (GTO) 2011 By Dr. C Mohan.
WSO2. Retrieved 23 June 2016.
[51] Big Data: Hype and Reality, Keynote Speaker Dr. C.
Mohan. Big Data Analytics and Education Conference,
July 2015. stanbul ehir University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Retrieved 23 June 2016.
[52] Valorar la educacin, el secreto del xito en la India:
Mohan. Noticias UAG, 14 November 2013. Universidad Autnoma de Guadalajara (UAG). Retrieved 23 June
2016.

External links
Homepage at IBM
C. Mohan on Facebook

C. Mohan on LinkedIn
C. Mohan on Twitter

EXTERNAL LINKS

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

8.1

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