K. Selcuk Candan
June 21, 2014
Exploratory search: New name for an old hat?
Exploratory search has gained prominence in recent years. There is an increased interest from several scientific communities, from the information retrieval and database to human-computer interaction and visualization communities, in moving beyond the traditional query-browse-refine model supported by web search engines and database systems alike, and towards support for human intelligence amplification and information understanding. […]
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Guy Lohman
April 10, 2014
Is Query Optimization a “Solved” Problem?
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 […]
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Philip A. Bernstein
February 24, 2014
Systems & Databases: Let’s Break Down the Walls
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 […]
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Arnab Nandi
December 11, 2013
Are Databases ready for Gestural Workloads?
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 […]
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Kristina Lerman
October 30, 2013
The Curses of Heterogeneity in Big Data
“Both theoretical and empirical research may be unnecessarily complicated by failure to recognize the effects of heterogeneity” – Vaupel & Yashin Big Data is daily topic of conversation among data analysts, with much said and written about its promises and pitfalls. The issue of heterogeneity, however, has received scant attention. This is unfortunate, since failing […]
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