Academic Blog

After Many Eyes (see Update #2) I got so excited that I couldn’t focus on anything. According to the plan, I attended Transactions, Security, and Caching but my thoughts were elsewhere. (Sorry.) The thoughts came back just before Surajit Chaudhuri’s talk in the Industrial Directions session. I treat it as a very good summary of both current and future directions for extending query optimizers by paying more attention to the usage information, which – if appropriately gathered – may provide the optimizer with more hints regarding the actual data distributions, the current state of the database, the contextual knowledge about the domain of application, et cetera.

The discussion after the talk was quite inspiring too. One of the questions – given that the talk referred broadly to the example of cardinality estimation – was whether cardinality is still something that we should be so interested in, in particular in the case of technologies based on massive sequential scans (including column scans in the columnar stores). I fully agree with the speaker’s answer that it may be important anyway in order to optimize the size of intermediate structures occurring for more complex queries. Nevertheless, let’s remember that the cardinality estimation is just an example of what the optimizer may rely on. In general, I can feel that practically all the currently existing query optimization approaches might benefit from extensions described in this talk, of course after appropriate translation.

Last but not least, let me briefly summarize the closing part – Award Presentations.

In the first talk, Masaru Kitsuregawa (Edgar Codd Innovations Award) referred to the history of hash-joins and, more generally, parallel computing in database applications. It was especially interesting to listen to the story of parallel development of Functional Disk System in Japan and Gamma System in USA. It’s also worth looking at the newest Prof. Kitsuregawa’s Information Grand Voyage project.

In the second talk, Jeffrey S. Vitter and Min Wang (Test of Time Award) spoke about wavelets. Let me refer to ICDE 2009 (Update #2), where the analogous award was granted to the wavelet applications as well. It looks like 1999 was a magic database year for wavelets, with two significant papers (SIGMOD 1999 and ICDE 1999) in the areas of data processing and data analysis.

In the third talk, Daniel Abadi (Jim Gray Dissertation Award) described his contribution to C-Store – the second famous (after Peter Boncz’s dissertation on MonetDB) academic project related to column stores. The main invention of C-Store – creation of multiple partial data copies (projections) sorted in multiple ways to provide optimal basis for query execution – has become the starting point of Vertica’s commercial product. In the meantime, Daniel keeps searching for new research directions and has just turned out to be a brilliant blogger. I really admire his ability to combine academic and industry interests, which is crucial for the scientific progress.

The forth talk was by Georgia Koutrika on CourseRank: A Social System for Course Planning developed at Stanford (Best Demonstrations Award). If you missed it, no problem – you can always attend the online lecture!

As a summary, the last three days passed very quickly. (It’s always like this when there’s something interesting going on.) I wish I attended the sessions on Monday, especially the Web of Concepts by Raghu Ramakrishnan. (I still remember his remote keynote earlier this year.) But let’s look into the future, to SIGMOD 2010 in Indianapolis!

Best greetings and keep in touch – Victoria has just posted her SIGMOD summary too,

Dominik