I'd rather play golf

On 30 January I attended the usual Friday database seminar at the University of Waterloo, and listened to UW graduate student Umar Farooq Minhas present the very interesting results of a paper [1] by several University of British Columbia researchers, including Andrew Warfield, one of the original developers of the XEN virtual machine monitor. The [...]

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Bill-of-materials (transitive closure) queries are reasonably common. Without recursion, the only way to compute a bill-of-materials result with a single SQL statement is through self-outer-joins, and the problem with self-joins, of course, is that one has to know in advance how many levels to traverse–that is, how many outer joins to code within the query. [...]

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This month’s edition of Communications of the ACM (December 2008) contains a number of articles related to data management. One that I’ll point out is an interview with relational database pioneer and IBM Fellow Patricia Selinger (nee Griffiths) with James Hamilton (now a VP with Amazon Data Services, having recently left Microsoft). The second is [...]

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