Strong Wisconsin presence at Midwest DB day this year 🦡❤️ Thank you Chunwei Liu and Aaron Elmore for organizing such a wonderful event!

We're thrilled to share that Hangdong Zhao has won the 2026 @sigmodconf.bsky.social Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award! His thesis "Advancing Join Algorithms for Real-world Queries" makes DB theory research practical by presenting join algorithms for real-world queries. We are so proud of you!

Huge congrats to Yifei Yang on completing his PhD in high-performance OLAP systems! 🎉 During his PhD, Yifei researched several novel techniques on distributed DBMS query execution. Now, he’s at @databricks.bsky.social on the query optimization team!

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Dr. Xiangyao Yu (@xiangyaoyu.bsky.social) will present the architecture of the Sirius GPU-native database system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Congrats to Ling Zhang for defending & completing her PhD! During her PhD, she specialized in in log processing and management, structured text search, and database query processing! She is now at @databricks.bsky.social on their Query Optimization team!

Belated congratulations to Konstantinos Kanellis for completing his PhD in ML-powered tuning for improving the performance of data and memory-tiering systems. He is now at AWS working on LLM-powered data systems!

Last Friday, the Wisconsin DB group visited Google Madison! Thank you for hosting, Prof. Goetz Graefe #TGIF file:///Users/abigale/Downloads/IMG_7019.jpg

Badgers at @vldb.bsky.social 2025! 🦡❤️🤍

Professor @xiangyaoyu.bsky.social has won the VLDB 2025 Early Career Award for his work on on disaggregated cloud DBMSs! Congrats to him and his students Zhihan Guo, Elena Milkai, Yifei Yang, and Wenjie Hu for their incredible contributions! Wisc DB is so proud of you ❤️

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!

@sigmod2025.bsky.social is happening in Berlin right now! As expected, our group is presenting some incredible work! More details below 🧵

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!

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

Konstantinos Kanellis, Sujay Yadalam, Fanchao Chen, Michael Swift, Shivaram Venkataraman: From Good to Great: Improving Memory Tiering Performance Through Parameter Tuning https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18714 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18714 https://arxiv.org/html/2504.18714

Congrats to Hangdong Zhao on successfully defending his thesis on join algorithms for real-world queries! He’s been a superstar in our group, winning the @sigmod2025.bsky.social PODS 2025 Best Paper and UW CS's Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award. Next stop: Microsoft GSL!