The Data Systems Group at the University of Waterloo's Cheriton School of Computer Science builds innovative, high-impact platforms, systems, and applications for processing, managing, analyzing, and searching the vast collections of data that are integral to modern information societies — colloquially known as “big data” technologies.
Our capabilities span the full spectrum from unstructured text collections to relational data, and everything in between including semi-structured sources such as time series, log data, graphs, and other data types. We work at multiple layers in the software stack, ranging from storage management and execution platforms to user-facing applications and studies of user behaviour.
Our research tackles all phases of the information lifecycle, from ingest and cleaning to inference and decision support.
News
Professor Xiao Hu wins Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems
Professor Xiao Hu has received a Best Paper Award at the 2025 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data for her research on optimizing join-aggregate queries.
Her paper, Output-Optimal Algorithms for Join-Aggregate Queries, addresses a long-standing open problem in database theory, establishing output-optimal bounds on the efficiency with which such queries can be processed.
University Professor M. Tamer Özsu receives 2025 Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision
University Professor M. Tamer Öszu has received the 2025 Award of Excellence in Graduate Supervision, a prestigious recognition conferred annually since 2005 by Waterloo’s Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs in collaboration with the Graduate Student Association.
DSG researchers awarded $440k from ORF-RI and CFI-JELF to develop scalable big data systems
Professors Khuzaima Daudjee and Sujaya Maiyya have been awarded $220,000 from the Ontario Research Fund–Research Infrastructure (ORF-RI) program. This amount was matched by the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s John R. Evans Leaders Fund (CFI-JELF), bringing total funding to $440,000.
The project, titled Scalable Infrastructure for Data-Intensive Systems, will address foundational challenges in managing and analyzing large-scale data.