Department at the University of Wisconsin in September 1976 after receiving his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. He served as department chair from July 1999 to July 2004. He held the title John P. Morgridge Professor of Computer Sciences when he retired from the University of Wisconsin in 2008. In 2008 Dr. DeWitt joined Microsoft as a Technical Fellow to establish and manage the Jim Gray Systems Lab in Madison for the SQL Server product group. He served in that position until 2016 when he moved to Boston to accept an Adjunct Faculty position at MIT. He consulted for Facebook from February 2017 until December 2018, for Amazon from October 2019 to January 2020, and for Snowflake from March 2020 to April 2021. From July 2021 until December 2023 he worked for Splunk as a VP and Technical Fellow/. He currently consults for Amazon and is a member of the technical advisor board for AkashX.
While a professor at Wisconsin his research program focused on the design and implementation of database management systems including parallel, object-oriented, and object-relational database systems. In the late 1980s and early 1990s his Gamma parallel database system project produced many of key pieces of technology that form the basis for today’s generation of large parallel database systems including Spark, SQL Server Synapse, Snowflake, Redshift, Presto/Athena, Vertica, and Teradata. (He was part of the Vertica startup from 2005-2008). Throughout his career he has also been interested in database system performance evaluation. He developed the first relational database system benchmark in the early 1980s, which became known as the Wisconsin benchmark.
Professor DeWitt is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1998), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), and an ACM Fellow (1995). His seminal contributions to the field of scalable/parallel database systems were recognized by ACM with the prestigious Software Systems Award in 2008. He received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award in 2009.