[DB Seminar] Fall 2018: Ethan Zhang (VoltDB)

Following from the idea that “one size no longer fits for all”, a family of “NewSQL” specialized databases arose. To handle OLTP, researchers at MIT and Brown (and a few other places) built H-Store, a distributed, shared-nothing, in-memory database that got rid of locking, latching, buffering, and logging, beating the performance of traditional OLTP RDBMSs by nearly two orders of magnitude.

This prototype was commercialized in 2009 as VoltDB. Since then, the two have lived full and productive lives in parallel universes: academia and industry, respectively.

In this talk, I will present:
* The architectural overview of VoltDB/H-Store
* Industry Universe: How VoltDB diverges from its academic roots – H-Store (and why)
* Academic Universe: New research on H-Store and how the industry sees it

Bio:
Ethan Zhang is a software engineer at VoltDB, where he leads the core team in developing the VoltDB’s query optimizer, data storage, and execution engine. Prior to joining VoltDB, Ethan received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Houston where he focused his research on developing scalable and parallel algorithms to analyze large data sets with new SQL databases, and big data in general with machine learning models.