Infobright Blog

Sitting at keynote #2 by Many Eyes – a “living laboratory” web site where people may upload their own data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. I immediately thought about uploading all our forums in order to visualize the main trends of discussions. Indeed, Many Eyes provides interesting tools for the text visualization – something that is more difficult and often more important than handling numeric information. Also, whenever I attend the talks about data/knowledge visualization/representation, I automatically recall such topics as approximate querying (do we need exact answers to visualize information?), our discussions whether and how to visualize our knowledge grid, as well as general aspects of business intelligence, data mining and human-computer interaction.

But let me go back to yesterday’s sessions…

After the already-mentioned Data Services session, I attended Query Optimization. Among the others, I liked ParAccel’s talk about additions to the PostgreSQL query optimizer, although I fully agree (that was one of the questions after the talk) that the columnar store specifics should be taken into account at this level to a larger degree. Further, in the Systems Research session, I enjoyed the overview of today’s leading Storage Class Memory technologies (I should put it together with the questions after our talk and our experience with the Sun’s Open Storage), as well as DryadLINQ, which is Microsoft’s way to make distributed computing on large compute cluster simple enough for ordinary programmers.

In the meantime, we had a pleasure to attend the 40 Years of Relational Model Celebration with a number of excellent presentations about Edgar Codd and the history of the whole idea, from both academic and industry perspectives. It was also a pleasure to meet and discuss with Curt Monash. Finally, after the Tour of Newport (I was supposed to go to Harbor Cruise but I thought the tour would be more interesting – and I’m not disappointed!), it was a pleasure to talk with the Tableau people during the banquet (we should try to do something more together).

All together, I do like SIGMOD.

More to come,

Dominik