Rick has chaired the ACM Publications Board and the ACM History Committee and has served on ACM Council. He was Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Database Systems from 2001 to 2007 and has served previously as Associate Editor of the International Journal on Very Large Databases and the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He chaired the Americas program committee for the 2001 VLDB Conference and the program committees for the 1994 SIGMOD Conference and the 1993 International Workshop on an Infrastructure for Temporal Databases. In addition, he has served as a vice-chair or member of many program committees.

Rick chaired the ACM SIGMOD Special Interest Group on Management of Data from 1997 to 2001. He received the 2004 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award and the 2002 ACM SIGMOD Outstanding Contributions Award. He has been involved in a number of initiatives.

Rick chaired the TSQL2 Language Design Committee and initiated the SQL/Temporal part of the SQL3 draft standard. Concepts and constructs from SQL/Temporal, including valid time and transaction time, have been included in the SQL standard and have been implemented in the IBM DB2 10, MarkLogic Server, Microsoft SQLServer, Oracle 9i, 10g., and 11g, SAP HANA, and Teradata Database 13.10 and 14 DBMSes. Other products and design patterns have also included temporal support based in part on these ideas.