David F. Bacon

David F. Bacon

David F. Bacon is the Principal Engineer leading the design and evolution of the Spanner storage engine (Ressi [1, 2]), for which he was a co-recipient of the 2025 SIGMOD Systems Award.


Other work includes the exploitation of new hardware technologies in databases, securing mission-critical hyper-scale systems against data corruption, and application of artificial intelligence to development of complex software systems. He is a co-founder of the Dagstuhl seminar series on Hardware Support for Cloud Database Systems (2024, 2026).

Prior to Google, he was a Principal Research Staff Member at IBM Research, and a visiting professor at Harvard in 2009-2010. His work included compilation and run-time systems for object-oriented programming [1, 2], hardware compilation [1, 2, 3], and real-time garbage collection [1, 2].

David received his A.B. from Columbia University in 1985 and his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1997. He is a Fellow of the ACM, and has served on the governing boards of ACM SIGPLAN and SIGBED.

Publications: DBLP, Google Scholar. Patents: Justia.

Authored Publications
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    Detection and Prevention of Silent Data Corruption in an Exabyte-scale Database System
    The 18th IEEE Workshop on Silicon Errors in Logic – System Effects, IEEE (2022)
    Spanner: Becoming a SQL System
    Nathan Bales
    Nico Bruno
    Brian F. Cooper
    Adam Dickinson
    Andrew Fikes
    Campbell Fraser
    Andrey Gubarev
    Milind Joshi
    Eugene Kogan
    Sergey Melnik
    Rajesh Rao
    Dave Shue
    Chris Taylor
    Marcel van der Holst
    Dale Woodford
    Proc. SIGMOD 2017, pp. 331-343 (to appear)