The database team of CWI received the SIGMOD Best Paper Award Runner Up on July 1, during the 35th SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (ACM SIGMOD'09) in Providence, Rhode Island (USA). It was awarded for the article 'An architecture for recycling intermediates in a column-store', written by Milena Ivanova, Martin Kersten, Niels Nes and Romulo Gonçalves of CWI.
The annual ACM SIGMOD conference is a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore cutting-edge ideas and results, and to exchange techniques, tools, and experiences. The article was selected out of 63 accepted papers from a competitive field of over 400 submissions.
The prize was awarded for innovative research on the realisation of the Sloan Digital SkyServer – a huge database of celestial bodies. Querying vast amounts of data is a big challenge for database systems. The team extended the MonetDB database system with a novel technique, the relational algebra recycling technique. This re-uses common computations in query streams without a priori planning of a database administrator. The efficiency of this new method is demonstrated using real-life query logs of the SkyServer application against the MonetDB database system. This resulted in the first open source solution that equalled the performance of the original one developed by J. Gray for Microsoft SQLserver. This major step makes MonetDB/SkyServer a valuable and mature experimentation platform to develop advanced techniques for scientific data management. This research was part of the Focus/BRICKS projects.
More information:
the article of CWI's database team
a copy of the article (ACM membership not needed)
BSIK BRICKS
<Picture: The award ceremony. From left to right: Johannes Gehrke (Cornell University, USA) of the ACM SIGMOD 2009 Best Paper Award Committee, Milena Ivanova (CWI), and Martin Kersten (CWI). Photographer: Stefan Manegold.
