I'd rather play golf

Yesterday afternoon I listened to Randall Burns of the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University describe “Engineering the Billion-Object Authenticated Directory”, a Sybase iAnywhere-sponsored seminar at the University of Waterloo’s School of Computer Science. Here was the abstract: Web 2.0 applications regularly store and access data from a variety of Internet storage services. [...]

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This past week I presented material at the Sybase 2009 Techwave Symposium at Washington DC’s Mayflower Renaissance Hotel. I have posted the Powerpoint slides for two of my talks on my Presentations page. Techwave is a tremendous opportunity to interact with customers, learn about their applications, and how SQL Anywhere is used in the myriad [...]

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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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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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I have posted several articles on the virtues of virtualization, including this one that referred to a published VMWare study that illustrated the benefits of consolidating multiple, lightly-loaded Oracle servers on a single physical machine. In response to that article, reader Mark Brady offered commentary that included this statement: We spun lots of apps onto [...]

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A recent (August 2008) VMware study of Oracle scalability with VMWare ESX illustrates the point: by consolidating multiple, lightly-loaded Oracle servers on a single physical machine, one can combine multiple Oracle instances together on a single hardware platform, yet continue to achieve adequate performance. Indeed, virtualization technology is becoming increasingly compelling. Want to install a [...]

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With the widespread adoption of virtualization within data centers, and the anticipated growth of virtualized data centers (to the tune of 10K nodes, if one believes Irfan Amad of VMWare) it is pretty clear that in addition to the scalability issues, two additional problems need to be solved: The first, mentioned to me by my [...]

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This afternoon I listened to Irfan Ahmad, a member of the Resource Management team at VMware, who gave a lecture entitled Topics in Virtualization Research to faculty and students at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Irfan discussed a survey of virtualization topics including: cloud and datacenter filesystems, [...]

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In July 2008 IDC, in co-operation with Hewlett-Packard, published a white paper extolling the virtues of virtualized environments along with a cost-benefit analysis that portends to make a strong business case towards the adoption of virtualization technologies in IT data centers. There is a ton of information on the Web about virtualized computing environments, and [...]

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Over the past few weeks I’ve tripped over a couple of interesting items that pertain to database system trends and what the future in database systems might look like over the near-to-medium term. Gazing into the proverbial “crystal ball” is fraught with uncertainty, but the authors of this material represent the world’s best database researchers, [...]

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