Kevin P. Gaffney

About

I'm an Applied Scientist at Microsoft Gray Systems Lab in Barcelona, where I work on database systems research. I received my PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2024, advised by Jignesh M. Patel in the Database Systems Group. Previously, I earned Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science and Biochemistry from the University of Oklahoma in 2018.

My research focuses on maximizing the performance of database systems by leveraging modern and emerging hardware.

Publications

• Taking Analytic Databases to the Bank. Alexandar Devic, Martin Prammer, Kevin P. Gaffney, Siddhartha Balakrishna Rai, Anand Sivasubramaniam, Jignesh M. Patel, Ameen Akel. ISCA (2026).
• CoddSpeed: Hardware Accelerated Query Processing in Microsoft Fabric. Matteo Interlandi, Nicolas Bruno, Brandon Haynes, Carlo Curino, Rathijit Sen, Yinan Li, Kaushik Rajan, Bailu Ding, Lukas M. Maas, Wei Cui, Kevin P. Gaffney, et al. SIGMOD (2026). Industry Track Best Paper Award.
• Membrane: Accelerating Database Analytics with DRAM-Based PIM Filtering and Schema Denormalization. Akhil Shekar, Kevin P. Gaffney, Martin Prammer, Khyati Kiyawat, Lingxi Wu, Helena Caminal, Zhenxing Fan, Yimin Gao, Ashish Venkat, José F. Martínez, Jignesh M. Patel, Kevin Skadron. ACM TACO (2026).
• Bridging the Processor-Memory Performance Gap in Database Systems. Kevin P. Gaffney. PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison (2024).
• Is Perfect Hashing Practical for OLAP Systems? Kevin P. Gaffney, Jignesh M. Patel. CIDR (2024).
• SQLite: Past, Present, and Future. Kevin P. Gaffney, Martin Prammer, Larry Brasfield, D. Richard Hipp, Dan Kennedy, Jignesh M. Patel. VLDB (2022). [podcast]
• How Good is My HTAP System? Elena Milkai, Yannis Chronis, Kevin P. Gaffney, Zhihan Guo, Jignesh M. Patel, Xiangyao Yu. SIGMOD (2022).
• Database Isolation By Scheduling. Kevin P. Gaffney, Robert Claus, Jignesh M. Patel. VLDB (2021).
• Goal Attainment Scaling Made Easy With an App: GOALed. Erin Gaffney, Kevin P. Gaffney, Lori Bartleson, Cindy Dodds. Pediatric Physical Therapy (2019).
• Automated Detection and Quantification of Residual Brain Tumor Using an Interactive Computer-Aided Detection Scheme. Kevin P. Gaffney, Faranak Aghaei, James Battiste, Bin Zheng. SPIE Medical Imaging (2017).

Experience

• Applied Scientist, Gray Systems Lab, Microsoft (2024–present).
• Research Assistant, Database Systems Group, University of Wisconsin–Madison (2018–2024).
• Graduate Intern, LinkedIn (2022).
• Research Scholar, SRC Research Scholars Program (2018–2022).

Teaching

• CS 564 Database Management Systems: Design and Implementation. Instructor (Spring 2023).