The Penn Database Group recently returned from VLDB in lovely Vancouver! Penn students, faculty, and collaborators presented three research papers and two workshop papers at the conference.
Ph.D. student Chenyuan Wu (supervisor: Boon Thau Loo) presented work on FlexChain and AdaChain. FlexChain (PDF) is the first work to present a blockchain that disaggregates compute, storage, RAM, and cold storage to better serve diverse workloads. AdaChain (PDF) shows how reinforcement learning can be used to adaptively switch a blockchain system between different architectures, keeping up with workload or hardware changes.
AutoSteer (PDF), an extensible system for steering the query optimizer of any SQL database, was presented by collaborator and TUM Ph.D. student Christoph Anneser. AutoSteer is open source, and has been tested on Meta’s Presto cluster. The AutoSteer work was a collaboration between UPenn, Intel Labs, MIT, Meta, and TU Munich.
Ph.D. student Bhavana Mehta (supervisor: Boon Thau Loo) presented RLShard (PDF), a vision for a Byzantine fault tolerant, sharded, transactional database at the aiDB workshop. RLShard contains designs for both a fully decentralized, trustless system, as well as a semi-centralized version taking advantage of an administrative domain. Bhavana will continue developing both approaches as part of her dissertation.
Also at aiDB, assistant professor Ryan Marcus presented a vision for Learned Query Superoptimization (PDF), a set of new techniques to improve common repetitive queries in analytic database systems. Ryan plans to implement this vision in the coming years.
The Penn DB Group will see you at the next one!
