Partner Event with Columbia Engineering: Department of Computer Science

C. Mohan, renowned computer scientist, will give a talk on the evolution of database systems, from traditional setups to modern, cloud-based solutions. He’ll cover how technologies like SQL and NoSQL work and share how the cloud has brought new changes, like the ability to manage computing resources more flexibly and automatically using AI. He will also discuss real-world examples from top companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Snowflake, showing how new innovations improve speed, reliability, and performance in today’s databases.

Speaker

C. Mohan, Distinguished Professor of Science, Hong Kong Baptist University, China; Distinguished Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University, China; and Retired IBM Fellow, IBM Research

Hosted By:

  • Eugene Wu, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia Engineering; Co-Chair of DSI Data, Media and Society Center
  • Donald F. Ferguson, Professor of Professional Practice in Computer Science, Columbia Engineering

Event Details

Monday, October 28, 2024 (12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET)

Location: Davis Auditorium – CEPSR

Register

Talk Information

A Survey of Cloud Database Systems

In this talk, I will first introduce traditional (non-cloud) parallel and distributed database systems. Concepts like SQL and NoSQL systems, data replication, distributed and parallel query processing, and data recovery after different types of failures will be covered. Then, I will discuss how the emergence of the (public) cloud has introduced new requirements on parallel and distributed database systems, and how such requirements have necessitated fundamental changes to the architectures of such systems. One of the most important cloud-related developments is the emergence of the concept of storage disaggregation which allows for dynamic allocation and deallocation of compute nodes for query processing. Exploitation of AI technologies to make the management of such systems more automated is another trend. I will also argue that ideas from shared disks on-premises DBMSs need to be adopted and adapted in the cloud environment to support increased capacity for read-write transactions, and to improve availability during system upgrades and compute node failures. 

I will illustrate the related developments by discussing some of the details of systems like Alibaba POLARDB, Microsoft Azure SQL DB, Microsoft Socrates, Azure Synapse POLARIS, Google Spanner, Google AlloyDB, CockroachDB, Amazon Aurora and Snowflake.

Bio: Dr. C. Mohan is currently a Distinguished Professor of Science at Hong Kong Baptist University, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in China, and a member of the inaugural Board of Governors of Digital University Kerala. He retired in June 2020 from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. He was an IBM researcher for 38.5 years in the database, blockchain, AI and related areas, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the well-known ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. This IBM (1997-2020), ACM (2002-) and IEEE (2003-) Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist (2006-2009). In addition to receiving the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award (1996), the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award (1999) and numerous IBM awards, Mohan was elected to the United States and Indian National Academies of Engineering (2009), and named an IBM Master Inventor (1997). This Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras (1977) received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin (1981). He is an inventor of 50 patents. During the last many years, he focused on Blockchain, AI, Big Data and Cloud technologies (https://bit.ly/sigBcP, https://bit.ly/CMoTalks). During 1H2021, Mohan was the Shaw Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore. Since 2016, Mohan has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor of China’s prestigious Tsinghua University. In 2023, he was named Distinguished Professor of Science of Hong Kong Baptist University. In 2021, he was inducted as a member of the inaugural Board of Governors of the new Indian university Digital University Kerala. Mohan has served on the advisory board of IEEE Spectrum, and on numerous conference and journal boards. During most of 2022, he was a consultant at Google with the title of Visiting Researcher. He has also been a Consultant to the Microsoft Data Team in 2020. Mohan is a frequent speaker in North America, Europe and Asia. He has given talks in 43 countries. He is highly active on social media and has a huge network of followers. More information can be found in the Wikipedia page at https://bit.ly/CMwIkP and his homepage at https://bit.ly/CMoDUK