Industry Affiliates Program Visit 2026 – Day 2

The second day of Carnegie Mellon University's Database Industry Affiliate Program (IAP) Visit Day, held in the Gates-Hillman Center, shifts focus to the industry side, featuring a series of informative sessions presented by member companies. These sessions offer companies the opportunity to showcase their latest innovations, products, and challenges in the database space, while also highlighting potential career opportunities for... Read More

Industry Affiliates Program Visit 2026 – Day 1

The first day of Carnegie Mellon University's Database Industry Affiliate Program (IAP) Visit Day takes place in the Gates-Hillman Center and is focused on showcasing cutting-edge research in the field of databases. The day is filled with a series of research talks delivered by faculty and students from the university's database group. These presentations provide an in-depth look at the... Read More

[Fall 2026] Bridging the Gap Between HTAP and Lakehouses for Analytics on Fresh Data

Speaker:

Nuno Faria

There has been a growing interest in systems that combine analytical performance with some form of transactions to support ever more frequent updates. On the one hand, hybrid transactional analytical processing (HTAP) systems support fine grained updates at the expense of using custom data formats and processing engines or of fully replicating data between transactional and analytical subsystems, thus limiting... Read More

Why We Created Yet Another Memory Framework: Understanding MGA’s Role in Next-Gen Database Systems

Speakers:

Vikramraj Sitpal , Shubham Kumar

System:

Oracle

Modern database engines already provide multiple memory areas, but under production constraints they often force a difficult choice: use globally shared memory (such as the SGA), with coarse visibility and lifecycle semantics, or use private process memory (such as the PGA), with stronger isolation but more copying, fragmentation, and indirect coordination when state must be shared selectively. This talk presents... Read More

Sirius: A GPU-Native SQL Engine (Xiangyao Yu)

Speaker:

Xiangyao Yu

System:

Sirius

Video:

YouTube

GPUs have evolved into powerful, cost-efficient engines for general-purpose parallel compute. This talk introduces Sirius, a GPU-native SQL engine developed in partnership between UW-Madison and NVIDIA. Sirius enables drop-in GPU acceleration for DuckDB and other SQL databases, without changing the user interface. By treating the GPU as the primary execution engine, Sirius achieves strong performance by leveraging the massive compute... Read More

The Extensibility Tax: Decisions, Principles, and Lessons from a Year of Teaching MySQL New Tricks (Steve Schirripa)

Speaker:

Steve Schirripa

System:

VillageSQL

Video:

YouTube

What does it take to add custom data types and indexes to a database that was never designed for them? Over the past year, we built an extensibility framework for MySQL — and discovered, one by one, every place the codebase assumes it knows all the types that will ever exist. This talk walks through the design decisions that survived... Read More

Floe: A SQL Query Service for the Modern Data Lakehouse (Kurt Westerfeld + Mark Cusack)

Speakers:

Kurt Westerfeld , Mark Cusack

System:

Floe

Video:

YouTube

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: Bringing Horizontal Scaling and Enterprise Operations to PostgreSQL (Sugu Sougoumarane)

Speaker:

Sugu Sougoumarane

System:

Multigres

Video:

YouTube

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

Inverting the Backend: Why We Built our MMORPG Inside a Database (Tyler Cloutier)

Speaker:

Tyler Cloutier

System:

SpacetimeDB

Video:

YouTube

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: A DBMS for Multimodal AI Applications (Marcel Kornacker)

Speaker:

Marcel Kornacker

System:

Pixeltable

Video:

YouTube

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