Congratulations to the #1 ranked @db.cs.cmu.edu PhD student Wan Shen Lim (@wslim.bsky.social) for successfully passing his doctoral defense. Wan has been working on hard AF database research with me for the last *nine* years at CMU (undergrad+grad). He also hates chickens.

in a tiny job update: I'm taking over as co-director of CMU's parallel data lab (PDL). in a bad news update: I just used the phrase "align with CMU's brand strategy" unironically in an email to the administration. might need an intervention...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jark Wu from AlibabaCloud will present an overview of Apache Fluss. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Do you like databases? Do you want to hear two database professors rant about them? Do you need one of those professors to have a Turing Award for databases? If yes, then join Mike Stonebraker and I next Wed Dec 10 @ 1:00pm EST for database hot takes: www.dbos.dev/webcast-2025...

There is still time to register for CIDR 2026 in Santa Cruz! If you need a roommate for the conference, there is also a spreadsheet you can use to find someone! www.cidrdb.org/cidr2026/reg...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Prashant Singh from Snowflake will present the Apache Polaris re-implementation of the Iceberg REST catalog API. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jeremy Taylor (@refset.bsky.social) will present the architecture of the XTDB (@xtdb.com) time-traveling database system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Benjamin Wagner🇩🇪 will present @firebolthq.bsky.social's native support for low-latency queries on Apache Iceberg tables. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Cheng Chen will present how @mooncakelabs.bsky.social extends PostgreSQL to support Apache Iceberg. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Great idea to compare plans across different systems using rows processed. A good yardstick, but slower sort-based plans from Postgres + MSSQL process fewer rows than faster hash-based plans from DuckDB. Postgres rows scanned also seem underreported. Nice to see some competition with ClickBench.

New database leaderboard from Yellowbrick ranks the quality of DBMS optimizer estimates and plans. They only evaluate TPC-H for now and report results for Postgres + DuckDB + MSSQL: sql-arena.com/components/p... Repo: github.com/sql-arena/db... LinkedIn Group: www.linkedin.com/groups/15775...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Ryan Johnson (CMU PhD'10) will present @deltalakeoss.bsky.social's internal architecture and how it supports multi-statement transactions. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Joyo Victor will present @singlestore.com's "Bottle Service" meta-data system that supports database branching, change-data-capture, and Apache Iceberg. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Lots of database action this week. Yes, I have a new start-up @sydht.ai with my PhD students @wslim.bsky.social + @17zhangw.bsky.social using LLMs to optimize almost everything in PostgreSQL. @datadictum.bsky.social posted a new article on our approach: www.theregister.com/2025/10/22/c...

Day 2 of #P99CONF is here! The #ScyllaDB Lounge opens at 8:00 am PST, and then we get things started with keynotes from @dorlaor.bsky.social and @andypavlo.bsky.social. Don't forget that all registrants receive Instant Access to the sessions once the conference ends. www.p99conf.io?latest_sfdc_...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Ian Cook (@ian.columnar.tech) will present @columnar.tech's work on Apache Arrow's database connectivity API (ADBC). ADBC is available in modern DBMSs. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Will Manning (@willmanning.com) will present @spiraldb.com's Vortex file format. Vortex is now a @linuxfoundation.org project. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

BTW if anyone wants a good intro to database storage / Log structured storage (aka LSM trees) @db.cs.cmu.edu lecture this fall is a good one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_sT...

MMAP is incredibly fast when the dataset fits in memory, but it slows to a crawl when it doesn't, especially if the workload is mostly random point lookups. Speaking as someone who built an MMAP-based key-value store before :) Obligatory paper from @andypavlo.bsky.social db.cs.cmu.edu/mmap-cidr2022/

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jordan Tigani (@jrdntgn.bsky.social) will present how @motherduck.com supports modern workloads with DuckLake. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Our SIGMOD paper with our friends at Tsinghua + @wesmckinney.com + @pateljm.bsky.social on creating a next generation open-source data file format is out. F3 is a future-proof file format avoids the mistakes of Parquet. 📄 Paper: db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2025/... 📁 Code: github.com/future-file-...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Vinoth Chandar will present the internals of Apache Hudi and his work at Onehouse. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Russell Spitzer will present the internals of Apache Iceberg's query planner and execution engine. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Next week is the start of @db.cs.cmu.edu's latest seminar series: Future Data Systems @samarchdb.bsky.social and I are hosting speakers from leading systems in the datalake / lakehouse space. Mondays @ 4:30pm ET via Zoom. Open to the public. Videos posted to YouTube: db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/fal...

I don't know what to say. You dream about it for so long and then when it finally happens you're in shock. I'm so proud of you Larry. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

What if a database could be your game engine? During parental leave @lukasvogel.bsky.social built DOOMQL: A multiplayer DOOM-like where everything (rendering, game loop, state) runs in pure SQL on CedarDB. It's fast, ridiculous, and surprisingly elegant. Full write-up: cedardb.com/blog/doomql

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

Launching my Programming Language Pragmatics talks! These short, accessible talks cover the material in the textbook, the 5th edition of which I wrote with Michael L. Scott. The first one introduces the topic and talks about why we study programming languages! www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwL0...

The report of my death was an exaggeration. I am still alive and will be in SFO this week to speak about using LLMs to automatically tune databases. Wed Aug 6th @ 5:30pm at Databricks MTV: lu.ma/ha0dc4nj

Attention, South Bay folk! We have The Databaseologist, @andypavlo.bsky.social, giving a talk in the bay on August 6th. Come join us for a great time in hearing: ChatGPT Ain’t Got $%@& On Me! The Future of Automated Database Tuning Register now! https://lu.ma/ha0dc4nj

At last @abigalekim.bsky.social's paper is out! Its the most complete eval of DB extensions/plugins ever. We analyze PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, DuckDB, Redis. TLDR: Postgres extns ecosystem is fraught with footguns. Other DBMSs have fewer extns but less problems. DuckDB has cleanest API.

People asked for the rest of the lecture videos for CMU-DB's optimizer course (15799.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2025). Unfortunately I got super sick and was in the hospital for 4 weeks. Thankfully @wslim.bsky.social + Jignesh taught the remaining lectures, but we didn't record those classes.

Shots fired by @firebolthq.bsky.social with their new on-prem executable (www.firebolt.io/blog/introdu...). They have dethroned the Umbra system by The Germans™ at ‪@tum.de in the ClickBench rankings: benchmark.clickhouse.com

Almost every db faculty that has received an nsf award ad benefitrd from hector and sylvia’s work. Well deserved!

Today's SQL or Death Seminar Speaker: Michael Sullivan (PhD'17) will present @geldata.com's "graph-relational" data model and query language to replace SQL. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/sql-d...

Variant is coming soon to @ApacheParquet in Rust . Huge thanks to @db.cs.cmu.edu for getting the process started in @ApacheArrow with a great draft PR to kick off Variant support: github.com/apache/arrow... 🙏🙏🙏 Thank you

New blog post on the mental model I've used when working through complex or confusing papers on transactional systems. transactional.blog/b...

After trying for several years, we finally have Monty Widenius giving a @db.cs.cmu.edu talk with us today! He will discuss the complete rewrite of @mariadb.bsky.social's query optimizer after forking from MySQL 15 years ago. You definitely should join us at 4:30pm ET over Zoom.

Today's talk is a follow-up to @bcantrill.bsky.social + @ahl.bsky.social 's October 2024 podcast about OxQL in response to my complaint about yet another query language [skip to 4:18] youtu.be/RTsXM3kcAaI?... Original tweet: twitter.com/andy_pavlo/s...

Today's SQL or Death Seminar Speaker: Ben Naecker from @oxide.computer will explain why a hardware company decided to make a new query language (OxQL) because SQL wasn't good enough! Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/sql-d...

Today's SQL or Death Seminar Speaker: @tobiasbrandt.bsky.social will present the #PRQL replacement for SQL. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/sql-d...

If you're out on bail you should join us today because this is going to be an excellent talk. Jeff has worked on databases at Google since 2005 (including F1, Mesa, Dremel). Talk is based on their VLDB'24 paper: research.google/pubs/sql-has...

to quote the great Andy Pavlo, "The CMU daycare is trying to kill me."

Today's SQL or Death Seminar Speaker: Yash Mayya + @gortiz.bsky.social from @startreedata.bsky.social will discuss how to support multiple query languages at the same time in Apache Pinot. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/sql-d...

Very grateful to be part of the 2025 Sloan Research Fellow cohort. Thank you my fantastic students and amazing colleagues who have made this possible! Many of them will be graduating soon. Hire them!

SCS faculty members Zhihao Jia and Deepak Pathak have received 2025 Sloan Research Fellowships. @cmurobotics.bsky.social

Today's SQL or Death Seminar Speaker: The Germans (Viktor Leis + Thomas Neumann) from @tum.de want to replace SQL with Sane Intermediate Representation (SaneIR) for relational query execution. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/sql-d...

Mahadev Satyanarayanan, the Jaime Carbonell University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. @nationalacademies.org

Over on Twitter, it's 2025 and people are still proposing terrible ideas for using blockchain databases. Why would anyone want to use a P2P BFT DBMS to track disease outbreaks? Put it in a centralized DBMS. At least now only 50% of replies are in favor of it. That's progress...

Today's SQL or Death Seminar Speaker: @jamescowling.dev (@convex.dev co-founder) will profess his love for Larry Ellison and @typescriptlang.org stored procedures. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/sql-d...