Author Archives: Mike Waas
in search of database unicorns
Over coffee, an acquaintance of mine who is the CEO of an emerging storage company put it simply: “There’s no point in investing in database companies—prospects are limited; after all there aren’t really any unicorns in that space!” Fair point. … Continue reading
orca now open source
One of the most amazing pieces of database technology was just released into the wild—yes, I’m talking about Orca. And yes, I might be a bit biased having been involved in the project in the past. Orca is the summary … Continue reading
call me mike
Meeting new customers, prospect and investors over the phone is integral part of being a founder. Unfortunately, with an uncommon name like mine almost every introduction has this awkward moment of “Excuse me, what did you say your name was?” … Continue reading
database guy wins Turing Award
Mike Stonebraker is this year’s Turing Award winner! ACM has chosen a recipient who like few others has shaped the software industry both with his academic contributions as well as his entrepreneurial ambition. Besides honoring an outstanding scholar the award also underlines the … Continue reading
how Hadoop can disrupt the database industry
Hardly any book has attracted more attention among software companies than Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” and some companies even welcome it as a sign of “innovative spirit” when engineers slap a product manager with it over the head, figuratively that … Continue reading
smdb’13 — the votes are in
The reviewing period for this year’s IEEE Workshop on Self-Managing Databases (SMDB) is over and the top papers have been determined! I’m very excited we were able to compile a strong program. As the following Wordle constructed from the abstracts … Continue reading
testing the accuracy of query optimizers
A while back I had a very interesting conversation with Jack an application developer for a larger software company in the area; so to speak a person on the other side of the database. He maintains that database application programmers … Continue reading
big data vs. pundits – 1 : 0
So, after all it wasn’t such a ‘razor tight’ presidential race last night. Not that the Big Data camp expected one in the first place. Nate Silver, the poster child of predictive analytics in the political arena made a pretty … Continue reading
socc’12
As expected, being a stand-alone conference made it difficult to attract what I call “casual attendees”. Folks who would be happy to spend a day or two after a big conference but won’t take the time out of their busy … Continue reading
smdb’13 — spread the word
ICDE’s Workshop for Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB) has long been the venue for all things concerning self-management of databases, however, it’s only with the advent of Big Data and the increasing popularity of hard-to-manage data sizes, data formats, and data fire … Continue reading
theory in practice 