Bernstein was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to transaction-processing and database systems.[3] He is also an elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.[4] He is a charter member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences (2008) and served on their board of directors from 2012 to 2018.
^ACM Fellows, Association for Computing Machinery. Accessed June 2011. Election citation: "For pioneering work in distributed query optimization, distributed databases, distributed transaction processing, metadata management, and schema integration."