I'd rather play golf

One of my personal highlights in attending last week’s ACM SIGMOD 2011 conference in Athens was to take in a tutorial [1] on Thursday morning entitled Data Management Over Flash Memory, presented by Ioannis Koltsidas of IBM Zurich and Stratis Viglas of the University of Edinburgh. Here was the abstract: Flash SSDs are quickly becoming [...]

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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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Despite our efforts at making relational database systems such as SQL Anywhere self-managing, self-tuning, and self-healing, there remains the need to be able to diagnose and repair performance problems. In part, this requirement is due to the overall complexity of the optimization task. Query optimization is – still – an NP-hard problem and the input [...]

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Yesterday the workshop’s PC co-chair, Carsten Binnig, posted the forthcoming DBTEST 2009 workshop program. This second DBTEST workshop is co-located with the 2009 ACM SIGMOD Conference, which will be held in Providence, Rhode Island later this month. Registration for both the workshop and the complete conference is now open. The workshop comprises talks of the [...]

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One of the improvements that my team has made to self-managing statistics maintenance in SQL Anywhere is the automatic maintenance of index clustering statistics. This means that the server’s query optimizer can now make better index selection choices, by analyzing the clustering characteristics of the index and adjusting the physical access cost accordingly. It is [...]

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I’d like to draw your attention to the March 2008 issue of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, whose editor-in-chief is David Lomet of Microsoft Research. The March 2008 issue concerns performance and correctness testing of database systems, and there are two papers in particular in that issue that I’d like to describe briefly. The first [...]

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