We present Floe, a SQL query service designed for modern data lakehouse architectures. Floe combines three core components: FloeSQL, a compute engine for executing sophisticated SQL over open table formats; Floecat, an open-source catalog-of-catalogs that unifies metadata across Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake ecosystems; and Floescan, an indexing service that enables fine-grained data skipping within Parquet files. Floe is motivated... Read More

Multigres is an adaptation of Vitess for PostgreSQL that enables horizontal scaling and enterprise-grade operational capabilities for Postgres deployments. The system employs a layered proxy architecture with MultiGateway for query routing and MultiPooler for connection pooling, allowing organizations to manage large distributed database clusters while maintaining PostgreSQL compatibility. Key features include modeless connection pooling that works as if you're directly... Read More

This talk explores what happens when you move all the infrastructure and logic of a fully featured, real-time backend application into the database. Using SpacetimeDB and BitCraft as a case study, the talk argues that the ideas behind stored procedures deserve a modern revival as a first class database feature: bringing deployment, transactions, relational data, and general-purpose procedural logic into... Read More

Pixeltable is a novel OLTP DBMS specifically designed for multimodal AI applications. It goes beyond the traditional roles of a DBMS — data storage and retrieval — by incorporating data generation into the table schema. Pixeltable natively supports multimodal data types (e.g., video, images, audio, documents) in the context of traditional multi-user transaction semantics. Unlike analytics-focused databases, Pixeltable also allows... Read More

We spent years optimizing database internals, only to have our performance eaten up by the one thing we can’t control: the OS. General-purpose kernels are great for desktops, but for high-performance data infrastructure, they become the bottleneck. In this talk I will introduce QuinineHM, a specialized "Hardware Manager," as a replacement for traditional operating systems in database workloads. We will... Read More

Databases and other data systems have successfully democratized data-oriented computation across domains, thanks to decades of research in system internals and end-user interfaces. However, such systems center on structured (i.e., tabular) data; unstructured data—the vast majority of data—has largely been ignored. Large language models (LLMs) now give us a building block for unstructured data analysis, and we face the same... Read More

YugabyteDB is an AI-ready, multimodal, distributed PostgreSQL database. It effectively bridges the gap between traditional RDBMS reliability and NoSQL flexibility, offering a cloud-native architecture that is resilient by design. Developers can thus leverage familiar PostgreSQL semantics while achieving the elastic scale and resilience required for mission-critical applications. This talk explores YugabyteDB's unique approach to fusing PostgreSQL’s query engine with a... Read More

The shift to multi-tenant clouds and growing data demands exacerbate contention on shared data infrastructure. In these environments, contention remains a primary bottleneck to performance. While there is extensive research on concurrency control protocols, these approaches share a fundamental limitation: they handle conflicts only after they have materialized, missing opportunities to improve performance by avoiding conflicts altogether. My research addresses... Read More

What does it really take to bring new ideas into a production system? In this talk, I will share some experiences from my first year working on query optimization at Microsoft Azure. I will recount the story of how we discovered that Microsoft SQL Server had, in effect, been executing the Yannakakis algorithm for decades—despite its only recent resurgence in... Read More

turbopuffer is an object storage-native search engine. It puffs data into a tiered NVMe SSD and RAM cache to achieve sub-10ms warm query latency. The storage engine minimizes roundtrips to object storage to limit cold latency and maximize concurrent IOPS. It even drives consensus with object storage through conditional writes. To build a successful, independent database you need three conditions:... Read More