In 2013, ICDT started to give a Test-of-time Award for the paper (or a small number of papers) that has had a significant impact in terms of research, methodology, conceptual contribution, or transfer to practice since it appeared in the proceedings of ICDT. In years with odd numbers and from 2020 on in all years, it is given to the best such paper of the ICDT conference that took place ten years ago. However, in 2014, 2016, and 2018 it will be given to papers that appeared before 2003 as detailed in the table below.
| Year | Eligible Conferences | Winner |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | ICDT 2014 | Todd L. Veldhuizen Leapfrog Triejoin: A Simple, Worst-Case Optimal Join Algorithm |
| 2023 | ICDT 2013 | Chao Li, Daniel Y. Li, Gerome Miklau and Dan Suciu A Theory of Pricing Private Data and Leonid Libkin, Wim Martens and Domagoj Vrgoč Querying Graph Databases with XPath |
| 2022 | ICDT 2012 | Dan Olteanu, Jakub Zavodny Factorised representations of query results: size bounds and readability |
| 2021 | ICDT 2011 | Abhay Jha, Dan Suciu Knowledge Compilation Meets Database Theory: Compiling Queries to Decision Diagrams |
| 2020 | ICDT 2010 | Michael Schmidt, Michael Meier, Georg Lausen Foundations of SPARQL query optimization |
| 2019 | ICDT 2009 | Alin Deutsch, Richard Hull, Fabio Patrizi, Victor Vianu Automatic verification of data-centric business processes |
| 2018 | ICDT 1999 & 2001 | Kevin S. Beyer, Jonathan Goldstein, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Uri Shaft When Is ''Nearest Neighbor'' Meaningful? and Peter Buneman, Sanjeev Khanna, Wang Chiew Tan Why and Where: A Characterization of Data Provenance |
| 2017 | ICDT 2007 | |
| 2016 | ICDT 1995 & 1997 | Chandra Chekuri and Anand Rajaraman Conjunctive Query Containment Revisited |
| 2015 | ICDT 2005 | Ahmed Metwally, Divyakant Agrawal, and Amr El Abbadi Efficient Computation of Frequent and Top-k Elements in Data Streams |
| 2014 | ICDT 1986-1992 | Val Breazu-Tannen (now Tannen), Peter Buneman, and Limsoon Wong Naturally Embedded Query Languages (ICDT 1992) |
| 2013 | ICDT 2003 | Ronald Fagin, Phokion Kolaitis, Renee Miller, and Lucian Popa Data Exchange: Semantics and Query Answering |