Author Archives: Mike Waas
dbtest’11: preview of EMC/DCD paper
Dealing with plan regressions caused by changes to the query optimizer has been a royal pain for any development organization. Even if you manage to shield your customers with clever tricks from experiencing these in their end-user workloads, plan regressions … Continue reading
benchmarking query optimizers
Performance evaluation with benchmarks has a long-standing tradition in the database industry and it has become customary to use benchmarks to underline the usefulness of many an idea in research papers over the past decades. Besides testing a system with … Continue reading
R and D — not: R or D
A few days ago a frustrated recruiter from an agency we have been using on and off for a while wrote to me I [come] to the conclusion that your standards are impossibly high. I don’t see myself being able … Continue reading
icde’11: preview of EMC/DCD paper
Is workload management via admission control good enough? Definitely not. Admission control based workload management is only one part of the solution and most database systems support this by now, one way or the other. However, the ability to run … Continue reading
beer: to buy or to brew — and where does map-reduce come into the picture?
Some 1,500 breweries in the U.S. produce around 6 billion gallons of beer every year. Interestingly, according to the American Homebrewers Association there are currently about 750,000 homebrewers in the U.S. In other words, several hundred thousand people who could … Continue reading
HyPer — rethinking architecture and execution
A few weeks ago Alfons Kemper of TU Munich visited EMC/Greenplum and gave a presentation on his latest research project (joint work with Thomas Neumann): an elegant yet astonishingly powerful implementation of a database system, called HyPer, that boasts both … Continue reading
into a new era
Much has been written about EMC’s acquisition of Greenplum a few weeks back. Most of the discourse focused on the impact EMC will have with the newly formed Data Computing Products Division on the data warehousing landscape as a whole … Continue reading
getting the basics right
Recently, a guest speaker at our Engineering Colloquium — a weekly institution at Greenplum — presented an elaborate scheme to improve the performance of a general purpose query processor. In short, the approach consisted of a couple of interesting although … Continue reading
% begin
Welcome to “theory in practice” — I intend to turn this into a place to discuss database technology, ideas related to “big data”, and what it takes to turn these ideas into products. And although you will eventually find all … Continue reading
theory in practice 