Since 1997, two awards are given annually to the best papers published in PODS.

Best Paper Award: This is an award for the best of all papers submitted, as judged by the program committee.

Best Student Award (2009 – ): From PODS 2009 on the Best Newcomer Award is replaced by the Best Student Award. This is an award for the best submission, as judged by the program committee, written exclusively by a student or students. An author is considered as a student if at the time of submission, the author is enrolled in a program at a university or institution leading to a doctoral/master’s/bachelor’s degree.

Best Newcomer Award (1997 – 2008): This is an award to the best submission, as judged by the program committee, written solely by authors who have never published in earlier PODS proceedings.

The program committee reserves the right to give both awards to the same paper, not to give an award, or to split an award among several papers. Papers authored or  co-authored by program committee members are not eligible for an award.

Recipients of the Best Paper Award:

2024
Albert Atserias, and Phokion Kolaitis:
Consistency of Relations over Monoids

Michael A. Bender, Martin Farach-Colton, Michael T. Goodrich, and Hanna Komlos:
History-Independent Dynamic Partitioning: Operation-Order Privacy in Ordered Data Structures

2023 
Balder Ten Cate, Victor Dalmau, Maurice Funk, and Carsten Lutz:       
Extremal Fitting Problems for Conjunctive Queries

2022   
Mahmoud Abo Khamis, Hung Q. Ngo, Reinhard Pichler, Dan Suciu, and Yisu Remy Wang:     
Convergence of Datalog over (Pre-) Semirings

Jelani Nelson, Huacheng Yu:   
Optimal Bounds for Approximate Counting

2021   
Graham Cormode, Zohar Karnin, Edo Liberty, Justin Thaler and Pavel Vesely:   
Relative Error Streaming Quantiles

2020   
Omri Ben-Eliezer, Rajesh Jayaram, David P. Woodruff and Eylon Yogev:
A Framework for Adversarially Robust Streaming Algorithms

2019   
Marcelo Arenas, Luis Alberto Croqueviell, Rajesh Jayaram and Cristian Riveros: 
Efficient Logspace Classes for Enumeration, Counting, and Uniform Generation

2018   
Yufei Tao:       
Entity Matching with Active Monotone Classification

2017 
André Hernich, Carsten Lutz, Fabio Papacchini and Frank Wolter:   
Dichotomies in Ontology-Mediated Querying with the Guarded Fragment

2016   
Mahmoud Abo Khamis, Hung Q. Ngo, Atri Rudra:     
FAQ: Questions Asked Frequently

2015   
Tom J. Ameloot, Gaetano Geck, Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven, and Thomas Schwentick: 
Parallel-Correctness and Transferability for Conjunctive Queries

2014   
Tom J. Ameloot, Bas Ketsman, Frank Neven, and Daniel Zinn: 
Weaker Forms of Monotonicity for Declarative Networking: A More Fine-Grained Answer to the CALM-Conjecture

2013   
Mikolaj Bojanczyk, Luc Segoufin, and Szymon Torunczyk: 
Verification of Database-Driven Systems via Amalgamation

2012   
Hung Q. Ngo, Ely Porat, Christopher Ré, Atri Rudra:   
Worst-case Optimal Join Algorithms

2011   
Marcelo Arenas, Jorge Perez, Juan L. Reutter:   
Data Exchange Beyond Complete Data

2010 
Daniel M. Kane, Jelani Nelson, David P. Woodruff:   
An Optimal Algorithm for the Distinct Elements Problem

2009   
Georg Gottlob, Stephanie Lee, Gregory Valiant:   
Size and Treewidth Bounds for Conjunctive Queries

2008 
Anish Das Sarma, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Rina Panigrahy: 
Estimating PageRank on Graph Streams

2007   
Georg Gottlob, Zoltan Miklos, Thomas Schwentick: 
Generalized Hypertree Decompositions: NP-Hardness and Tractable Variants

2006   
Mikolaj Bojanczyk, Claire David, Anca Muscholl, Thomas Schwentick, Luc Segoufin:   
Two-Variable Logic on Data Trees and XML Reasoning

2005   
Dirk Leinders, Jan Van den Bussche:   
On the complexity of division and set joins in the relational algebra

 and  Marcelo Arenas, Leonid Libkin:   
XML Data Exchange: Consistency and Query Answering

2004 
Maarten Marx:     
XCPath, the first order complete XPath dialect

2003   
Marcelo Arenas, Leonid Libkin: 
An Information-Theoretic Approach to Normal Forms for Relational and XML Data

2002   
Georg Gottlob, Christoph Koch:   
Monadic Datalog and the Expressive Power of Languages for Web Information Extraction

2001   
Ronald Fagin, Amnon Lotem, Moni Naor:   
Optimal Aggregation Algorithms for Middleware

2000   
Jon M. Kleinberg, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Prabhakar Raghavan:   
Auditing Boolean Attributes

1999   
Michael Benedikt, Leonid Libkin:   
Exact and Approximate Aggregation in Constraint Query Languages

1998   
Frank Neven, Jan Van den Bussche: 
Expressiveness of Structured Document Query Languages Based on Attribute Grammars

Vasilis Samoladas, Daniel P. Miranker:     
A Lower Bound Theorem for Indexing Schemes and Its Application to Multidimensional Range Queries

1997   
Christos H. Papadimitriou, Mihalis Yannakakis:   
On the Complexity of Database Queries

Recipients of the Best Student Paper Award:

2017
        Sepehr Assadi:
        Tight Space-Approximation Tradeoff for the Multi-Pass Streaming Set Cover Problem
2016
        Adam Sealfon:
        Shortest Paths and Distances with Differential Privacy
2009
        Pawel Parys:
        XPath Evaluation in Linear Time with Polynomial Combined Complexity

Recipients of the Best Newcomer Award:

2024
        Christoph Dorn, and Haikal Pribadi:
        TypeQL: A Type-Theoretic & Polymorphic Query Language
2008
        Karl Schnaitter, Neoklis Polyzotis:
        Evaluating Rank Joins with Optimal Cost
2007
        Joost Engelfriet, Hendrik Jan Hoogeboom, Bart Samwel:
        XML Transformation by Tree-Walking Transducers with Invisible Pebbles
2006
        Michael Bender, Haodong Hu:
        An Adaptive Packed-Memory Array
2005
        Martin Abadi, Bogdan Warinschi:
        Security Analysis of Cryptographically Controlled Access to XML Documents
2004
        Maarten Marx:
        XCPath, the first order complete XPath dialect
2003
        Samir Khuller, Yoo-Ah Kim, Yung-Chun (Justin) Wan:
        Algorithms for Data Migration with Cloning
2002
        Chung-Min Chen, Christine T. Cheng:
        From Discrepancy to Declustering: Near optimal multidimensional declustering strategies for range queries
2001
        Kim S. Larsen:
        Relaxed Multi-Way Trees with Group Updates
2000
        Marc Spielmann:
        Verification of Relational Transducers for Electronic Commerce
1999
        Steven Dawson, Sabrina De Capitani di Vimercati, Patrick Lincoln, Pierangela Samarati:
        Minimal Data Upgrading to Prevent Inference and Association
1998
        Vasilis Samoladas, Daniel P. Miranker:
        A Lower Bound Theorem for Indexing Schemes and Its Application to Multidimensional Range Queries
1997
        Oliver M. Duschka, Michael R. Genesereth:
        Answering Recursive Queries Using Views