May 14, 2013
Figure 1 shows a portion of a relational table contained in a real, large information system. The table concerns the customers of an organization, where each row stores data about a single customer. The first column contains her code (if the code is negative, then the record refers to a special customer, called “fictitious”), columns […]
Read moreMarch 22, 2013
Got your attention? Now that I have it, I would like to take a few minutes to discuss the role of limited attention and information overload in science. Attentive acts such as reading a scientific paper (or a tweet), answering an email, or watching a video require mental effort, and since the human brain’s capacity […]
Read moreMarch 6, 2013
Big Data should be Interesting Data! There are various definitions of Big Data; most center around a number of V’s like volume, velocity, variety, veracity – in short: interesting data (interesting in at least one aspect). However, when you look into research papers on Big Data, in SIGMOD, VLDB, or ICDE, the data that you […]
Read moreDecember 11, 2012
Fifty years ago a small team working to automate the business processes of the General Electric Low Voltage Switch Gear Department in Philadelphia built the first functioning prototype of a database management system. The Integrated Data Store was designed by Charles W. Bachman, who later won the ACM’s Turing Award for the accomplishment. He was […]
Read moreNovember 4, 2012
As data is becoming increasingly more important in our society, there are many successful companies doing data-related businesses. This field grows so fast that many new startups are launched with the goal to become the “next Google.” This trend also provides a lot of entrepreneurship opportunities for our community working on data management research. This […]
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