One Size Fits All in DataBase Management: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone

When: 
Thursday, May 10, 2007 - 7:00pm
Room: 
E51-315
Lecturer(s): 
Michael Stonebraker, EECS Dept. MIT

Joint Meeting with IEEE Computer Society and Boston DAMA

The database engines from the major RDBMS vendors were architected in the 1970s, primarily to serve the needs of business data processing. Since that time, as businesses evolved from just processing data to using it more strategically, RDBMSs have been applied in such diverse areas as data warehousing, business intelligence, unstructured content management, and managing scientific and real-time data. Over time, vendors have grafted features onto their engines to support these new applications – for example, materialized views, bitmap indexes and data cubes for the data warehouse market. While there are obvious advantages to this “one-size-fits-all” strategy for database vendors, there is a large cost to customers. Specifically, they are stuck with very poor performance in some of these newer application areas. In this talk, database technology pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker will discuss why it is twilight for one-size-fits-all, especially in data warehousing. In addition, he will discuss recent developments in DBMS technology research and why there’s been a recent explosion in the number of new, specialized databases. Technology developments that are transforming DBMS include: * Grid-based parallelism using commodity hardware * New concurrency architectures * Column-oriented database technology * SQL for real-time data stream and event analysis * Aggressive database compression technologies Dr. Stonebraker will briefly discuss these advancements as well as when and how they’ll begin affecting data warehouse and BI implementations and the businesses that use them.

Lecturer Biography: 

Dr. Stonebraker has been a pioneer of data base research and technology for more than a quarter of a century. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. These prototypes were developed at the University of California at Berkeley where Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science for twenty five years. More recently at M.I.T. he was a co-architect of the Aurora/Borealis stream processing engine as well as the C-Store column-oriented DBMS. He is the founder of four venture-capital backed startups, which commercialized these prototypes. Presently he serves as Chief Technology Officer of StreamBase Systems, Inc., which is commercializing Aurora/Borealis and Vertica, which is commercializing C-Store. Professor Stonebraker is the author of scores of research papers on data base technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services. He was awarded the ACM System Software Award in 1992, for his work on INGRES. Additionally, he was awarded the first annual Innovation award by the ACM SIGMOD special interest group in 1994, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. He was awarded the IEEE John Von Neumann award in 2005, and is presently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at M.I.T., where he is working on a variety of future-generation data-oriented projects.