[2][3] Vianu did his graduate studies at the University of Southern California, earning his Ph.D. in 1983 under the supervision of Seymour Ginsburg; he joined the UCSD faculty in 1984.
At the 2010 Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, Vianu and his co-authors Dan Suciu and Tova Milo won the Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award for their work ten years prior on type checking for XML transformation languages.
[4] Vianu and his co-author Luc Segoufin won a second Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time award in 2015, for their 2005 article "Views and Queries: Determinacy and Rewriting."
In 2006, Vianu was elected as a Fellow of the ACM for his "contributions to database management systems".
In his first paper recorded by DBLP[6] (presented at MFCS, 1977), Vianu acknowledges Solomon Marcus for guidance.