Shankar Pal of SQL Server went to VLDB this year and passed his notes my way.  Find them here: http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/perspectives/content/binary/ShakarPal_VLDB2007.docx.

Key points from my perspective:

·         Werner Vogels

o   Amazon able to lose a data center without missing SLA (note that this would also allow them to bring a down data center for service and implies they don’t need backup power or other datacenter-level redundancy – this can potentially save 20% of the total cost of a data center. I don’t know if they are exploiting this capability)

o   SLAs are two-way: a commitment to deliver a certain quality of service one way and a commitment the other way to deliver no more than a specified load

o   Amazon has implemented their services as a cluster of services. Services can scale up a single node at a time (elastic computing).  All data access is through the services. 

o   Repeats Stonebraker’s “One size doesn’t fit all” in databases.

·         Eric Brewer:

o   Founder of Inktolmi and Berkeley DB researcher

o   Discussed work he is doing in the third world.

·         Surajit Chaudhuri and Vivek Narasayya presented a retrospective on self-tuning database management systems

·         Michael Stonebraker

o   Presented “the end of an era: It’s time for a rewrite” and essentially argued that the current set of “elephants” in DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle are optimized for OLTP in a small memory world.  Outside of OLTP, these products are a poor fit and, even in OLTP, large memory systems make their disk I/O optimizations much less relevant.

o   He argues to get rid of redo log by keeping many different copies (I’m not ready to get rid of the redo log but I totally agree on the base point)

o   Mike still doesn’t buy that eventual consistency is the right model for high scale distributed systems

The conference proceedings is at:

http://sqlserver/projects/clouddb/Conferences/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fprojects%2fclouddb%2fConferences%2fVLDB%20%28Int%27l%20Conf%20on%20Very%20Large%20Data%20Bases%29%202007%2fVLDB%202007%20Proceedings%2fVLDB%202007%20Proceedings&FolderCTID=&View=%7b3CB64B8A%2d1B85%2d45AE%2d91B6%2d4063E886D023%7d

                                                --jrh

James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
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