New England Database Society Friday, January 28, 2005 sponsored by Sun Microsystems
NEDS

Database Requirements in the Age of Scalable Services

Adam Bosworth 
Vice President of Engineering
Google 

Friday, January 28, 2005, 4:00 PM
Volen 101, Brandeis University

(preceded by a wine and cheese reception at 3:00 pm)

Abstract:

About five years ago I started to notice an odd thing. The products that the database vendors were building had less and less to do with what the customers wanted. This is not just an artifact of talking to enterprise customers while at BEA. Google itself (and I'd bet a lot Yahoo too) have similar needs to the ones Federal Express or Morgan Stanley or Ford or others described, quite eloquently to me.

So, what is this growing disconnect?  It is this. Users of databases tend to ask for three very simple things: 

1) Dynamic schema so that as the business model/description of goods or services changes and evolves. 

2) Dynamic partitioning of data across large dynamic numbers of machines. 

3) IR-like, comprehensive indexing. 

If the database vendors ARE solving these problems, then they aren't doing a good job of telling the rest of us. The customers I talk to who are using the traditional databases are esentially using them as very dumb row stores and trying very hard to move all the logic and searching out into arrays of machines with in memory caches. Oracle is doing some very clever high end things with streaming queries and the ability to see data as of some point in recent history (and even which updates affected the query within some date range) and with integrated pub/sub and queueing, but even Oracle seems to make systems too static and too ponderous to really meet the needs about and, oh yes, they seem to charge about ten times as much as one would expect for them. 

In this talk, I will discuss what customers have reported that they require of their Database Systems.

Speaker Bio:

Adam Bosworth joined Google recently as Vice President of Engineering. Bosworth comes to Google from BEA where he was Chief Architect & Senior VP of Advanced Development and responsible for driving the engineering efforts for BEA's Framework Division. Prior to joining BEA, Adam Bosworth co-founded Crossgain, a software development firm acquired by BEA. Known as one of the pioneers of XML, Mr. Bosworth held various senior management positions at Microsoft, including General Manager of the WebData group, a team focused on defining and driving XML strategy. While at Microsoft, he was responsible for designing and delivering the Microsoft Access PC Database product and assembling and driving the team that developed Internet Explorer 4.0's HTML engine.

Maintained by Dina Goldin dqg AT cse.uconn.edu