With all this gray weather in Seattle, it’s good to look forward to good talks and events indoors. Two events coming up this Friday and Saturday look to be good if you’re into database internals and/or Internet scale computing.

On Friday the 13th at 11:30 the Northwest Database Society will be hosting a talk by visiting MIT associate professor Sam Madden on column store architectures. The talk is in CSE 605 at UW. Here are some details of the talk, forwarded to me by UW professor Dan Weld:

ABSTRACT:
Vertical partitioning is a well-established technique for improving query processing performance in relational database systems. Surprisingly, the database community has recently unleashed a flurry of research projects (C-Store, MonetDB) and startup companies (Vertica, InfoBright, ParAccel) proposing “column-oriented databases”, which appear to be nothing more than a conventional database with a fully vertically partitioned storage system. In this talk, I will describe how our work on the C-Store system goes beyond simple vertical partitioning. I will begin with an overview of column-oriented technology and its applications and then focus on the unusual aspects of the design of the storage system and query executor. I will also describe a series of experiments that show why vertical partitioning in a conventional database does not perform as well as a system designed from the ground up to support columns, showing that our academic prototype can achieve order-of-magnitude performance improvements over a commercial database on a recently proposed data warehousing benchmark.

BIO
Samuel Madden is an Associate Professor in the EECS Department and CSAIL at MIT. He is a specialist in networked data management and database systems. As the author of the TinyDB system for sensor network data collection, the co-creator of the CarTel mobile sensor network system for automobiles, one of the architects of the C-Store database system, and a co-founder of Vertica Systems, a database startup commercializing column-stores. He has published articles in top computer science conferences, including SIGMOD, SenSys, and OSDI on data acquisition and processing, database optimization, query planning, and distributed databases. Madden received the NSF CAREER Award in 2004, the Sloan Fellowship in 2006, was named on of Technology Review’s Top 35 Under 35 in 2006 for his work in data management in sensor networks, and won best paper awards in VLDB 2004 and 2007 and MobiCom 2006.

On Saturday June 14 Google will host its second annual Scalability conference at the swanky W Hotel in Seattle. It’s an all-day event starting at 8:30. If it’s anything like last year’s event, it should be fun and informative. There’s also a bonus reception mixer on Friday evening (the 13th) from 4:00 to 6:00 at Google’s Fremont office.

Look for other blist colleagues and me at either event. Don’t be shy. Come say hello.