Now that I've been the PC chair for a conference, I will never submit a late review again.

This is a class of bugs that can only exist in cyberphysical systems. Plane thinks it's on the ground, but it's actually in the air. Hard to imagine being on this support call -- "The plane says I'm on the ground." "Are you?" "Nope." "Huh. That's not good." Salient quote: "At that point, the […]

If you still use Twitter, there's a sale on Premium today. I went through the checkout process, closed the window at the Stripe payment page, then got an email 10 minutes later with an offer for a year of free Premium. I have a stupid blue check next to my name but there are fewer ads! "Cancel […]

I thought database folks were always hyperbolic and overly resistant to change in the peer review process, but I just saw a NeurIPS AC compare desk rejecting papers submitted by absentee reviewers to familial extermination / collective punishment during the Qin dynasty, so maybe the database […]

This is your yearly reminder that anyone who publishes CS papers should have a personal website that lists their current position, research interests, publications, and email address. If you don't, it's basically impossible for me to invite you to a PC […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

OLAP workloads are dominated by repetitive queries -- how can we optimize them? A promising direction is to do 𝗼𝗳𝗳𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 query optimization, allowing for a much more thorough plan search. Two new SIGMOD papers! ⬇️ LimeQO (by Zixuan Yi), a 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑘𝑙𝑜𝑎𝑑-𝑙𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑙 […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

The abstract deadline for SoCC '25 is about a month away! This year's event is fully online. https://acmsocc.org/2025/papers.html

Kept writing bad code today, an expert had to take over and guide my hand.

"Database venues are just about LLMs now!" -- LLMs are certainly on the rise, but this claim isn't supported by the data. Papers about LLMs are certainly growing very quickly, but last year there were: * Almost 3x more papers about indexing, * Almost 4x […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

When modern analytic databases process `GROUP BY` queries, they tend to use a partitioning strategy for parallelism. The conventional wisdom is that partitioning has better scalability due to lower contention. But is this wisdom still true in 2025? Penn […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

The NSF GRFP, a training grant awarded to promising American students at public and private colleges looking to earn a PhD, was cut in half this year. When faculty admit a PhD student, they are committing to raising ~$500k to fund that student. The GRFP […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

The deadline for aiDM 2025 -- the SIGMOD workshop on Exploiting Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Data Management -- has been extended to this Friday, March 28th. If you were on the fence about a submission, now is your change to make it! http://aidm-conf.org/#dates

Just a reminder that the names of your bibtex citations get included in the PDF (both as the link anchor name and in the metadata), so if you name a paper `morons_who_copied_us`, reviewers and readers will be able to see that...

A very nice paper from UMD about catalog storage on data lakes. While I'm not totally sold on their solution (I have some doubts about the hierarchical data model), the discussion of various tradeoffs and design principles is top notch. I think there's clear space for major innovation in the […]

Pair(akeet) programming.

I made a simple tool to look for related database papers (VLDB, SIGMOD, CIDR, PODS) given a new paper's title and abstract using vector embeddings. It highlights authors who are currently in the reviewer pool. I'm sure my horrible Python hack will break at […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

My hot take of the day is that we're pretty good at evaluating PhD applicants (at least better than random), but the number of qualified applicants greatly exceeds the number of available slots. So there exists pairs of students (X, Y) where X is admitted and Y isn't admitted, but the […]