July 13, 2015
A Federated DBMS is a middleware offering that runs on top of (perhaps several) local DBMSs and presents a seamless interface to disparate systems with (perhaps) independently constructed DBMS schemas. Systems in this category include R*, Ingres*, Garlic, IBM’s Information Integrator, and several others. These offerings should be contrasted to parallel DBMSs, which are single […]
Read moreApril 10, 2014
Is Query Optimization a “solved” problem? If not, are we attacking the “right” problems? How should we identify the “right” problems to solve? I asked these same questions almost exactly 25 years ago, in an extended abstract for a Workshop on Database Query Optimization that was organized by the then-Professor Goetz Graefe at the Oregon […]
Read moreFebruary 24, 2014
After hanging out exclusively with the database community for 35+ years, I’ve recently become more involved with the systems research community. I have a few observations and recommendations to share.Much of the work published in systems conferences covers topics that would have a natural home in database conferences. For example, transactions and data streams are […]
Read moreDecember 11, 2013
In 2011, I was traveling on the Kolkata Metro when I made an interesting observation. Nearly every passenger around me was using a computing device of some sort. Some were playing with their smartphones, some with their tablets, some listening to music on their iPod Touches. Each was a consumer of structured data of some […]
Read moreMay 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 […]
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