Thoughts on the VLDB conference

I attended VLDB 2007 (33rd International Conference on Very Large Databases) in Vienna,Austria 2 weeks ago. Here are a few highlights for me.

Some DBMS trivia about early RDBMS design

According to one senior researcher that I talked to, Ted Codd designed a complete database programming language in the late 1960s (i.e.,something along the lines of Pascal/R,Rigel,or the modern-day Ruby on Rails). According to this researcher,Ted knew he could never win against PL/1 within IBM. Hence,he focused on a data sublanguage which could be called from PL/1. This is the reason for the early RDBMS decision to focus on a data sublanguage rather than a database programming language,again according to this researcher.

More progress needs to be made on DBA interfaces

Another researcher who works for a very large enterprise said the databases they use all have more than 100 “tuning knobs.” His average DBA (of which his company has more than 1,000) uses less than a dozen. His biggest hot button was simplification of the DBA interface. He also claimed that the automatic tuning aids from the major OLTP databases were not good enough for “prime time” and his DBAs did not use them.

Yahoo!,unstructured search,and community portals

Another researcher said that the Google data management facilities (Google file system,MapReduce,etc.)have been duplicated and are seemingly available to Yahoo! This will make scalable,brute-force searching of unstructured data more widely available. While on the subject of Yahoo!,it is building a “portal factory” that can crank out vertical market-specific portals for communities of users,along the lines of its portal for database researchers described in CIDR 2007.

Thoughts on the OLPC project

Lastly,I enjoyed immensely the invited keynote speech by Eric Brewer,who talked about technology to help underdeveloped countries. Since he is a networking guy,the talk focused on low-end networking to support things like remote medical clinics (e.g.,time-share the doctor using networking). He also made a couple of interesting points about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC),$100 computer project. First,he said display prices are the biggest barrier to the $100 price point. Also,he pointed out that villages in underdeveloped countries typically have one cell-phone per village — typically the phone is supported by an entrepreneurial resident receiving a “micro loan.” Brewer was much more interested in a computer that was sharable by many children (i.e.,one computer per classroom). He used an example of computer-assisted instruction with a mouse per student. The software would only advance to the next scene when everybody had the right answer. That way,the fast students have to help the slower ones. In his experience a single-mouse computer just gets monopolized by the best student,and the slower ones are left behind. All in all,a very interesting talk.