Patrick O'Neil

Patrick Eugene O'Neil (1942 – September 20, 2019) was an American computer scientist, known for his expertise in databases and his contributions to the field. He served as a professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. O'Neil completed his undergraduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a B.S. in mathematics in 1963. He later obtained a master's degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics from Rockefeller University in 1969. O'Neil worked in both academia and industry, but returned to academia in 1988 as a member of the UMass/Boston faculty, eventually becoming a full professor in 1996. He authored influential papers on distributed databases, page replacement strategies, SQL isolation, and database indexing strategies. O'Neil co-authored the widely used database textbook 'Database Principles, Programming, and Performance' with Elizabeth O'Neil.