Abstract: When making databases simpler, it's important to be clear who the intended beneficiaries are: application users, SQL authors, database administrators, engine developers or testers, etc. It seems that goals must inherently be contradictory: for example, simplifying database administration by automatic tuning of indexes and other issues in physical database design requires sophisticated engine code, perhaps permeated by machine intelligence, and extremely careful quality assurance and testing, perhaps using techniques not yet invented. In contrast, this talk reviews ideas in query languages, query execution plans, and concurrency control that might simplify the work of all involved, from SQL authors to engine testers.
Speaker: Dr. Goetz Graefe, Principle Scientist at Google
Bio: Goetz Graefe has written surveys on database indexing, locking and concurrency control, logging and recovery, query execution, query optimization, and sorting. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison 1983-1987 and graduated with an MS in 1984 and a PhD in 1987 with a thesis on extensible query optimization in EXODUS. Since then, he invented the Exchange operator for parallel query execution and the Volcano and Cascades frameworks for query optimization, received an ACM SIGMOD Test of Time award and the inaugural IEEE ICDE Influential Paper award for those inventions, served as the query processing architect of Microsoft SQL Server in its formative years, researched concurrency control, logging, and recovery as an HP Fellow at HP Labs, shared in an ACM Software Systems award, and received the 2017 ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations award. He is now the Technical Lead of the F1 Query system widely used within Google
Speaker: Dr. C. Mohan, Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University; IBM Fellow (retired)
Abstract: Based on my 4 decades long involvement in and exposure to numerous database systems, in this talk I will discuss how various factors led multiple systems to be evolved in ways that made them become more complex in terms of their design as well as their usability aspects. While simplicity of design and architecture might be a highly desirable objective, there will invariably be conflicting requirements that lead to complexity creeping in, at least with respect to the internals of such systems. Examples of such requirements relate to the cloud environment, performance, availability, heterogeneity in terms of supported hardware, operating systems and programming language environments, accommodation of multiple workload types, extensibility, etc. It is also the case that aiming for simplicity in one aspect of system design might cause complexity to be introduced in other areas. A case in point is the desire for the near elimination of the need for DBAs and tuning knobs in the cloud environment which makes the internals of such systems become much more complex so that they could dynamically detect and react to different workload types that such systems might be used for. While KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) might be a desirable design principle, following it mindlessly might result in the kiss of death with respect to performance and reliability!
Bio: Dr. C. Mohan is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in China, a Member of the inaugural Board of Governors of Digital University Kerala, and an Advisor of the Kerala Blockchain Academy (KBA) and the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA) in India. He retired in June 2020 from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. He was an IBM researcher for 38.5 years in the database, blockchain, AI and related areas, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the well-known ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. This IBM (1997-2020), ACM (2002-) and IEEE (2002-) Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist (2006-2009). In addition to receiving the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award (1996), the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award (1999) and numerous IBM awards, Mohan was elected to the United States and Indian National Academies of Engineering (2009), and named an IBM Master Inventor (1997). This Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras (1977) received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin (1981). He is an inventor of 50 patents. During the last many years, he focused on Blockchain, AI, Big Data and Cloud technologies (https://bit.ly/sigBcP, https://bit.ly/CMoTalks). Since 2017, he has been an evangelist of permissioned blockchains and the myth buster of permissionless blockchains. During 1H2021, Mohan was the Shaw Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) where he taught a seminar course on distributed data and computing. In 2019, he became an Honorary Advisor to TNeGA for its blockchain and other projects. In 2020, he joined the Advisory Board of KBA. Since 2016, Mohan has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University. In 2021, he was inducted as a member of the inaugural Board of Governors of the new Indian university Digital University Kerala (DUK). Mohan has served on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum, and on numerous conference and journal boards. During most of 2022, he was a non-employee consultant at Google with the title of Visiting Researcher. He has also been a Consultant to the Microsoft Data Team. Mohan is a frequent speaker in North America, Europe and Asia. He has given talks in 43 countries. He is highly active on social media and has a huge network of followers. More information can be found in the Wikipedia page at https://bit.ly/CMwIkP and his homepage at https://bit.ly/CMoDUK