So grateful for @tylerhillery.com and @xiangpeng.systems for kickstarting this effort! We will be hosting talks on all the cool stuff people are doing, so definitely check the Luma calendar out 💯

@tylerhillery.com, @xiangpeng.systems, and I are super stoked to announce the creation of the Madison Systems group and our first event, a coffee chat on Nov. 9th at Union South (UW-Madison campus)! Luma invite here: luma.com/v69tvpla

It was super fun recording this with Jack, thank you for letting me talk about my research and share the joy (and pain) of extensions research to the world! 🎉

Yes!!!! Super excited to be there!!

Congrats to Bobbi Yogatama for defending his thesis on GPU data analytics! Recently, he’s been leading Sirius DB (github.com/sirius-db/sirius), which is a GPU-native SQL engine built on top of @duckdb.org. After graduation, he’s headed to NVIDIA!

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.

Congrats to Elena Milkai on defending her thesis on real-time transactional analytics! One of her projects, HERMES (@vldb.bsky.social 2025), enables data consolidation across transactional and analytical engines without system changes. After grad, she’s headed to Salesforce's DB team!

Go Will!

Congrats to the winners from our group at the CS department awards! Hangdong Zhao: Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award Yifei Yang: Klug Fellowship in Database Systems Konstantinos Kanellis: Landweber Fellowship in Distributed Systems @abigalekim.bsky.social: First Yr Summer Fellowship