Top Five Data Challenges for the Next Decade

Monday, March 13, 2006 - 6:00 p.m. to Tuesday, March 14, 2006 - 6:55 p.m.

Distinguished Lecturer Series III

Featuring:
Dr. Patricia Selinger
IBM Fellow and Retired Vice President

Location: McDonnell Douglas Auditorium
Reception to follow, free to the public

Parking is located in the new Engineering Parking Structure, view map

Abstract:

For the past three decades, those in the database field have principally focused attention and significant effort on technology for storing, querying, accessing, and securing data with well-known structure in high-performance data management systems. The focus has been riveted on performance, performance, performance. However, the world has changed dramatically since the early days of database management systems. Join Dr. Patricia Selinger, IBM Fellow and retired Vice President as she discusses the top five challenges in the database area for the next decade. 

The dynamics of DBMSes have changed, moving from supporting back office systems, to front offices, to web-based systems. Computer architecture has changed, as we have moved from systems where 256K was considered a large size memory, disk drives were very expensive, most processors were water-cooled, and screens glowed with green characters. Not only has more data been produced in the last several years than in all previous history, but more and more of it is in digital form.


Accelerated pace and higher expectations driven by competitive necessity have changed the nature of database solutions from well-understood batch-oriented processing, to real-time, ad hoc query on continuously streaming data. All these changes are coming together to create a new set of challenges for the decade ahead. In this presentation, Selinger will talk about the top five of these challenges in the database area.


About the Speaker:


A recognized pioneer in relational database management throughout the IT industry, Dr. Selinger was a leading member of the IBM Research team that produced the world's first relational database system and established the basic architecture for the highly successful DB2 database product family. Her innovative work on cost-based query optimization for relational databases has been adopted by nearly all relational database vendors and is now taught in virtually every university database course.

Dr. Selinger was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1999, and in 2004, was inducted into the Hall of Fame for WITI.