I'd rather play golf

August 29, 2011 marks the date for the 3rd TPC Technology Conference on Performance Evaluation and Benchmarking, co-located with the 37th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB) which will be held in Seattle, Washington from August 29th through September 3 at the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle. TPCTC 2011 is organized again this year [...]

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This past Monday I listened to Tim Brecht of the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo as he presented a paper entitled Our Troubles with Linux and Why You Should Care, a paper [1] co-authored by Tim, Peter Buhr and Ashif Harji which will be presented this coming Monday, 11 July 2011, [...]

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“Infinity always gives me vertigo” is a line from the song “Mystery” by well-known Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn – it’s found on his 2006 album Life Short Call Now. It’s a catchy phrase, and an appropriate lead-in to discussing the term scalability. In particular, the term infinite scalability. Recently I’ve been seeing the use of [...]

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Monday’s DBTEST 2010 Workshop at the 2010 ACM SIGMODconference in Indianapolis concluded with an interesting panel discussion that included keynote speaker Phyllis Frankl (Polytechnic Institute of NYU), Leo Giakoumakis (Microsoft), Harumi Kuno (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories), Ken Salem (University of Waterloo) and Florian Waas (Greenplum). Each panelist discussed what they thought the “Grand Challenges” of database and [...]

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This past Thursday I had the opportunity to listen to Peter F. Sweeney of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Laboratory as he spoke on “The Poor State of Experimental Evaluation of Software and Systems in Computer Science” during a lecture at the University of Waterloo. Here’s Peter’s abstract: As hardware and software continues to [...]

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In SQL Anywhere Version 10 we introduced Application Profiling, a set of graphical tools that could not only assist DBAs to diagnose performance problems but could also recommend solutions to common performance problems discovered during the analysis. Included in Application Profiling is a (cheap) mechanism to capture queries (and their access plans) that consume a [...]

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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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In the past few weeks I’ve witnessed a number of published performance analyses, both with and without SQL Anywhere. By and large these “benchmarks” have been exceedingly simplistic, which is unsurprising since a simple benchmark requires significantly less development effort than a complex one. Performance analyses I see frequently, for example, involve (simply) inserting a [...]

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This past Saturday, ORM toolkit provider X-tensive.com announced ORMBattle.Net, “The ORM Tool Shootout”. What X-tensive has done is they’ve created a “benchmark” to test the efficiency of various ORM toolkit implementations, and then published the results, comparing Microsoft’s Entity Framework, Lightspeed, LLBLGenPro, NHibernate, OpenAccess, and Subsonic with X-tensive’s own ORM toolkit, DataObjects.Net. Unsurprisingly, the performance [...]

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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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