ICDT gives several awards with the following rules:

• The Best Paper Award  is given to the best paper.
• An award can be given to the best paper written by newcomers to the field of database theory or to ICDT. The latter award is preferentially given to a paper written only by students; in that case the award is called Best Student Paper Award. Otherwise it is called Best Newcomer Paper Award.
• The program committee reserves the following rights: not to give an award; to split an award among several papers; and to define the notion of a newcomer. Papers authored or co-authored by Program Committee members are not eligible for any award.

2022

• Best Paper Award 
  Shay Gershtein, Uri Avron, Ido Guy, Tova Milo, and Slava Novgorodov
  On the Hardness of Category Tree Construction
• Best Newcomer Award
  Florent Capelli, Nicolas Crosetti, Joachim Niehren, and Jan Ramon
  Linear programs with conjunctive queries

2021

• Best Paper Award 
  Cristina Feier, Carsten Lutz, and Marcin Przybyłko 
  Answer Counting Under Guarded TGDs

2020

• Best Paper Award 
  Antoine Amarilli and İsmail İlkan Ceylan 
  A Dichotomy for Homomorphism-Closed Queries on Probabilistic Graphs

2019

• Best Paper Award 
  Ahmet Kara, Hung Q. Ngo, Milos Nikolic, Dan Olteanu and Haozhe Zhang 
  Counting Triangles under Updates in WorstCase Optimal Time

2018

• Best Paper Award 
  Wim Martens and Tina Trautner 
  Evaluation and Enumeration Problems for Regular Path Queries

2017

• Best Paper Award 
  Simone Bova and Hubie Chen 
  How Many Variables are Needed to Express an Existential Positive Query?
• Best Newcomer Award
  Wei Cao, Jian Li, Haitao Wang, Kangning Wang, Ruosong Wang, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong, and Wei Zhan 
  k-Regret Minimizing Set: Efficient Algorithms and Hardness 

2016

• Best Paper Award
  Mark Kaminski and Egor V. Kostylev
  Beyond Well-Designed SPARQL
• Best Newcomer Award 
  Anirban Dasgupta, Kevin Lang, Lee Rhodes and Justin Thaler
  A Framework for Estimating Stream Expression Cardinalities 

2015

• Best Paper Award 
  Douglas Burdick, Ronald Fagin, Phokion Kolaitis, Lucian Popa, and Wang-Chiew Tan
  A Declarative Framework for Linking Entities
• Best Student Paper Award
  Nadime Francis
  Asymptotic Determinacy of Path Queries using Union-of-Paths Views

2014

• Best Paper Award
  Matthias Niewerth, Thomas Schwentick
  Reasoning about XML Constraints based on XML-to-relational mappings
• Best Student Paper Award
  Tom Ameloot
  Deciding Correctness with Fairness for Simple Transducer Networks
• Best Newcomer Award
  Todd Veldhuizen
  Leapfrog Triejoin: A Simple, Worst-Case Optimal Join Algorithm 

2013

• Best Paper Award
  Chao Li, Daniel Li, Gerome Miklau, and Dan Suciu 
  A Theory of Pricing Private Data

2012

• Best Paper Award
  Balder Ten Cate, Victor Dalmau, and Phokion Kolaitis 
  Learning Schema Mappings
• Best Newcomer Award 
  Christian Konrad and Frederic Magniez
  Validating XML Documents in the Streaming Model with External Memory

2011

• Best Paper Award
  Claire David, Leonid Libkin, and Tony Tan
  Efficient Reasoning about Data Trees via Integer Linear Programming
• Best Student Paper Award 
  Daniel Deutch
  Querying Probabilistic Business Processes for Sub-Flows

2010

• Best Paper Award
  Marcelo Arenas, Ronald Fagin, and Alan Nash
  Composition with target constraints
• Best Student Paper Award
  Diego Figueira
  Forward XPath and extended register automata on data trees
  and 
  André Hernich
  Answering non-monotonic queries in relational data exchange

2009

• Best Paper Award
  Foto Afrati and Phokion G. Kolaitis
  Repair Checking in Inconsistent Databases: Algorithms and Complexity
• Best Student Paper Award
  Todd J. Green
  Containment of conjunctive queries on annotated relations

2007

• Best Newcomer Award
  Piotr Wieczorek
  Complexity of Typechecking XML Views of Relational Databases

2005

• Best Newcomer Award
  Albert Atserias
  Conjunctive query evaluation by search tree, revisited

2003

• Best Newcomer Award
  Jan Hidders
  Typing Graph-Manipulation Operations

2001

• Best Newcomer Award 
  Chung Keung Poon
  Orthogonal range queries in OLAP

1997

• Best Student Paper Award
  Chandra Chekuri and Anand Rajamaran
  Conjunctive Query Containment Revisited

1995

• Best Student Paper Award 
  Dan Suciu
  Domain-independent queries on databases with external functions

1990

• Best Student Paper Award 
  Peter Revesz
  A closed form for Datalog queries with integer order

1986

• Best Student Paper Award 
  V. S. Lakshmanan
  Split-Freedom and MVD-Intersection: A New Characterization of Multivalued Dependencies Having Conflict Free Covers