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:
–jrh
James Hamilton, Windows Live Platform Services
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