I'd rather play golf

Yesterday afternoon I listened to Sunil Prabhakar of Purdue University on the Orion Uncertain Data Management System [1-4]. Sunil’s talk is one of the Database Seminar Series at the University of Waterloo which is sponsored by Sybase iAnywhere. Here’s Sunil’s abstract: Many applications domains are faced with the need to store and manipulate uncertain or [...]

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This past Friday afternoon (22 May 2009) I listened to Ahmed A. Soror present work on a Virtualization Design Advisor for DBMS Workloads, follow-on work to a preliminary paper presented last summer at SIGMOD 2008 (Vancouver). Ahmed’s co-authors include a fellow graduate student, Umar Farooq Minhas, faculty members Ken Salem and Ashraf Aboulnaga, all from [...]

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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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One of Hibernate’s strengths is its ability to work with a wide variety of database systems. One of the ways in which it is able to do so is including a Java layer that customizes the SQL statements being sent to the underlying DBMS to match the dialect and feature set of that particular system. [...]

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There is perhaps no other scientific field like Computer Science that can re-invent technology on such a regular basis and call it “new”. This is certainly true with the latest virtualization systems now available, such as VMware and Xen; twenty-five years ago I was a performance specialist with VM/CMS on IBM mainframes. The goals of [...]

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