Academic Blog

When attending ICDE 2009, I blogged every evening. This time I wanted to blog right after waking up. However, it doesn’t work so well. There is always something to be done in the morning – emails, forums, urgent things that you forgot to do yesterday… As a result, I’m already sitting at the Data Services session (I switched from the Database Optimization session in the very last moment) and I’m still gathering my thoughts…

Yesterday’s Keynote was excellent! Hasso Plattner – the co-founder of SAP and the head of the HPI Institute – combined general observations on the evolution of OLTP and OLAP systems with a specific case of SAP applications. Indeed, there is a growing interest in technologies that would be able to combine OLTP and OLAP features. You can find some relevant examples in Section 3. (I like especially the categorization of the types of updates.) Indeed, the proposed in-memory column store approach may turn out to be the way to go. (Certainly, there are some technical details to be further discussed, e.g., the SAP’s dictionary-based compression that was also presented in the Column Stores session. However, in general, isn’t it surprising to see the column store-based mechanisms as an efficient support for OLTP?!)

I also liked the discussion after the Keynote. Obviously, implementation of the idea of in-memory column stores in production would require a significant development effort. So, one of the questions was whether SAP could be potentially ready to make such an effort. Prof. Plattner’s answer was honest and straightforward: If you can see that your technology does not meet requirements any longer, if you can see a good alternative, you have no choice – you need to rewrite the code. Actually, SAP has already done a similar exercise in the past…

Besides the Keynote, Victoria and I enjoyed very inspiring presentations on MonetDB in the already-mentioned Column Stores session, the comparative “Shared-Nothing-MapReduce” analysis in the Large-Scale Data session (with a very hot discussion, as usual), and the Peta-Scale Yahoo! presentation in the Data Warehousing morning session. Of course we also enjoyed presenting Infobright!!! (See the forum for details and the presentation attached.)

Best greetings,

Dominik