Speaker:

Filip Obradovic

Date:

Mon Mar 23, 2026 @ 04:30pm EDT

Date:

Mon Mar 23, 2026

Time:

04:30pm EDT

Location:

https://cmu.zoom.us/j/99830697483?pwd=RLKiHNDLPvOyoCMHSBGmWfbba4ZAb4.1Zoom

Title:

Dataware: Databases without an OS? Meet QuinineHM

System:

TonicDB

Video:

YouTube

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Talk Info:

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 begin by examining the “Why”: how a general-purpose OS restricts database performance. Following this, we will explore the implementation of the Hardware Manager, detailing its structure, its distinctions from general-purpose OSes and unikernels, and the implementation challenges faced while building such a system. Finally, we will take a quick look at TonicDB, our bare-metal Redis-compatible store built on QuinineHM, and see the performance improvements.

This talk is part of the PostgreSQL vs. The World Seminar Series.

Bio:

Filip founded and is CEO of Dataware

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