I'd rather play golf

On 20 October I had the privilege to address the 2011 Insight Out Conference in Tokyo, Japan, where the majority of attendees are Japanese business application developers and the speakers are drawn from a cross-section of the database industry, with Oracle, Microsoft, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Sybase represented. Insight Out is spearheaded by Hiroki Mizokami of [...]

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This past Monday I listened to Shivnath Babu of Duke University present a lecture entitled “MADDER and Self-tuning data analytics on Hadoop with Starfish“. In a nutshell, the Starfish project is about the development of self-tuning and self-managing technology for Hadoop systems, and many of the same challenges that exist in self-managing relational database systems, [...]

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In the context of a database management system like SQL Anywhere, what system behaviours constitute robustness? The concept, at least, sounds very simple. This past week I attended a workshop on Robust Query Processing being held at the Dagstuhl conference center in Wadern, Germany, to discuss this very subject, and all of its nuances. The [...]

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At last week’s Sybase Techwave conference in Washington, my colleague Anil Goel presented two talks on the now-available SQL Anywhere 12 server: Self Management and Self Healing in SQL Anywhere: This talk gives an overview of the self-managing and self-healing features of SQL Anywhere 12, including high-level descriptions of the buffer pool manager, statistics manager, [...]

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In the latest (December 2009) edition of ACM SIGMOD Record that arrived on my desk on Wednesday, Kyu-Young Whang et al. survey [1] a selection of research prototypes and commercial DBMS products that fit the notion of a ubiquitous database. Here’s the paper’s abstract: Advancement in mobile computing technologies has prompted strong needs for database [...]

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As mentioned previously, Mohammed Abouzour and Peter Bumbulis of Sybase iAnywhere, along with Ken Salem of the University of Waterloo, had their paper entitled “Automatic Tuning of the Multiprogramming Level in Sybase SQL Anywhere” accepted for publication at the forthcoming 5th International Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems which will be co-located with the IEEE Data [...]

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The 5th International Workshop on Self-Managing Database Systems, co-located with the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, takes place on 1 March 2010 in Long Beach, California. Over the weekend the SMDB 2010 Program Committee made final selections of the papers to be included in the Workshop. Out of 15 submissions the program committee [...]

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At June’s 2009 ACM SIGMOD Conference, Surajit Chaudhuri of Microsoft Research presented a thought-provoking paper [1] entitled “Query Optimizers: Time to Rethink the Contract?”. Here is the abstract: Query Optimization is expected to produce good execution plans for complex queries while taking relatively small optimization time. Moreover, it is expected to pick the execution plans [...]

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Chapman & Hall/CRC Press have recently launched a new book series on database systems and data management, entitled the “Emerging Directions in Database Systems and Applications” series. The series editor is Sham Navathe of Georgia Tech, who is well known for his introductory text Fundamentals of Database Systems, which he co-authored with Ramez Elmasri, now [...]

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The CFP for the 5th Self Managing Database Systems Workshop, SMDB 2010, was recently posted by the Program Committee co-chair, Shivnath Babu of Duke University. Next year’s Workshop, which is organized by the IEEE Data Engineering Workgroup on Self-managing Database Systems, will take place in Long Beach, CA on 1 March 2010 along with the [...]

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