This talk presents recent research and development at Snowflake aimed at pushing the boundaries of database performance and functionality. In the first section, we will introduce a series of optimizations designed to accelerate query execution within Snowflake’s platform. We will discuss the technical challenges associated with developing general-purpose optimizations and balancing performance improvements across a wide range of workloads. The... Read More

This tech talk will deep dive into some of the most interesting challenges being solved at Databricks. Read More

LSM (Log-Structured Merge) trees are now the bedrock of many storage engines and datastores like RocksDB, HBase, Cassandra etc. They provide the ability to avoid random-writes, and provide immutability. Data is organized in multiple-levels that are exponentially increasing in size. Each data mutation writes a new version of an object, and background processes named merge/compaction continuously remove the unused versions,... Read More

AI Vector Search in Oracle 23ai is a new, transformative way to intelligently search through your unstructured business data efficiently, and accurately, by using AI techniques to match on the semantics, or meaning, of the underlying data. With the inclusion of a new VECTOR datatype, new approximate search indexes, and new SQL operators and extensions, enterprise companies can quickly and... Read More

Dataframes are popular tools for interacting with and exploring data, but they are not as well understood nor as deeply studied as databases. Python's pandas. and Apache Spark are two of the most popular dataframes in use by data practitioners, but even these are extremely different from each other in terms of guarantees and user expectations. In this talk, we... Read More

Developing AI applications is costly and difficult and recent trends have only intensified these challenges. Developers use a bottom-up approach, focusing on the nitty-gritty of integration and infrastructure, which leads to a complex "blob" of code. Changes to this blob are risky due to the intricate web of dependencies. Fort Alto has fundamentally rethought the application development process with a... Read More

The rise in computer storage and network performance means that disk I/O and network communication are often no longer bottlenecks in database management systems (DBMSs). Instead, the overheads associated with operating system (OS) services (e.g., system calls, thread scheduling, and data movement from kernel-space) limit query processing responsiveness. User-space applications can elide these overheads with a kernel-bypass design. However, extracting... Read More

Index structures are at the database management systems' core to facilitate efficient data access. Due to the constant changes in application requirements and hardware trends, people are going through exhaustive and painstaking work designing/tailoring new index structures to catch up. In this talk, I will show a vision of a systematic index structure design framework that will allow index designers... Read More

The rise in computer storage and network performance means that disk I/O and network communication are often no longer bottlenecks in database management systems (DBMSs). Instead, the overheads associated with operating system (OS) services (e.g., system calls, thread scheduling, and data movement from kernel-space) limit query processing responsiveness. To avoid these overheads, user-space applications prioritizing performance over simplicity can elide... Read More

Database management system (DBMS) extensibility is a feature which enables users to extend the DBMS with user software. However, the DBMS extensibility environment is fraught with perils, and DBMS developers have to resort to unspecified methods of developing extensions, including copying core DBMS source code and casing between different versions of the DBMS. Extending a DBMS to support new functionality... Read More