Academic SystemsOriented Database Research Betty Salzberg Northeastern University

Academic Systems-Oriented Database Research Betty Salzberg Northeastern University HPTS 1999 presentation HPTS-1999 B. Salzberg

A report from the October 1998 NSF workshop on industrial/academic cooperation in database systems • Speakers were from industry • Audience was from academia • Web site: http: //www. ccs. neu. edu/groups/IEEE/indacad HPTS-1999 B. Salzberg 2

System-Oriented Database Research • What mistakes are common on academic papers? • What are good research problems? • What is the value-added of a Ph. D. ? • How can industry help get the students and the research it would like? HPTS-1999 B. Salzberg 3

What mistakes are common on academic papers? • Wrong Assumptions: Example: Jeff Vitter’s 1985 TODS paper where he assumed you could add bits to a block on a WORM disk. But 1000 bytes is the smallest writable unit with a 300 -byte checksum burned into the disk. • No Consideration of Performance Costs: Example: Optimistic concurrency. An abort is much more expensive than a wait if there has been any writing. In the no-conflict case, the expense of keeping track of and comparing lists of reads and writes at commit is worse than the expense of a lock table. HPTS-1999 B. Salzberg 4

What are some good research problems? (excerpt from workshop) • • • Schema integration • Distributed application management version management • performance modeling comparative studies • tools for back-tracing zero administration tool for compensation • support disconnected clients action creation • tools to enable • data cleansing exploitation of new • cache consistency in hardware and software three tier systems HPTS-1999 B. Salzberg 5

What is the value-added of a Ph. D. ? • • Older and more mature Can read technical papers critically Can write technical papers Can give technical talks Has completed a long project (Persistent!) Has been vetted (passed qualifying exam) More likely than bachelor’s student to understand basics May have done a lot of programming for the Ph. D. project Does the Ph. D. thesis subject matter? HPTS-1999 B. Salzberg 6

If you want more relevant research papers and new employees with system sense, please help us. HPTS-1999 B. Salzberg

How can industry help get the students and the research it would like? (suggestions from workshop) • Collaborate • Ph. D. student internships • Visits ---(both ways) – sabbaticals – summers – short visits/talks • write papers for major conferences • send contributions to IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin or SIGMOD Record • Let an academic interview you for an article • serve on program committees • review papers for journals • write textbooks or help write them • take an academic job (“wouldn’t it be nice if academics were industry professionals as well? ”) HPTS-1999 B. Salzberg 8