What Becomes a Senior Researcher

As we progress through life, our needs, desires, and even objectives, change. That certainly has been the case for me over the years. This article is my attempt at distilling what advice I can for someone making a transition from a junior to a senior researcher in the database field: think Associate Professor or someone 5 to 10 years post PhD.

Database Tuning using Natural Language Processing

Introduction. We have seen significant advances in the state of the art in natural language processing (NLP) over the past few years [20]. These advances have been driven by new neural network architectures, in particular the Transformer model [19], as well as the successful application of transfer learning approaches to NLP [13]. Typically, training for specific NLP tasks starts from large language models that have been pre-trained on generic tasks (e.g., predicting obfuscated words in text [5]) for which large amounts of training data are available. Using such models as a starting point reduces task-specific training cost as well as the number of required training samples by orders of magnitude [7]. These advances motivate new use cases for NLP methods in the context of databases.

Matrix Query Languages

Due to the importance of linear algebra and matrix operations in data analytics, there has been a renewed interest in developing query languages that combine both standard relational operations and linear algebra operations. We survey aspects of the matrix query language MATLANG and extensions thereof, and connect matrix query languages to classical query languages and arithmetic circuits.

Report on the Third International Workshop on Semantic Web Meets Health Data Management (SWH 2020)

Creating a holistic view of patient data comes with many challenges but also brings many benefits for disease prediction, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. Especially in the COVID-19 era, this is more important than ever before. The third International Workshop on Semantic Web Meets Health Data Management (SWH) was aimed at bringing together an interdisciplinary audience who was interested in the fields of Semantic Web, data management, and health informatics. The workshop goal was to discuss the challenges in healthcare data management and to propose new solutions for the next generation of data-driven healthcare systems. In this article, we summarize the outcomes of the workshop, and we present a number of key observations and research directions that emerged from presentations.

Joy Arulraj Speaks Out on Non- Volatile Memory Database Systems

Welcome to this installment of the ACM SIGMOD Record's series of interviews with distinguished members of the database community. I'm Marianne Winslett, and today I have here with me Joy Arulraj, who won the 2019 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award for his thesis entitled The Design and Implementation of Non-volatile Memory Database Management Systems. Joy is now an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech, and his PhD is from the Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked with Andy Pavlo, who won this same award in his time. So, Joy, welcome!

VLDB Panel Summary

Database education is at an inflection point. With the surge of interest in all things "data", enrollments in traditional database courses are at an all time high. At the same time, the rise of Data Science as a discipline has led to the creation of new courses whose content significantly overlaps that of an introductory database course (e.g. data preparation, cleaning, SQL). Students from all across campus aspire to take data science courses, even with limited Computer Science backgrounds. This juxtaposition of content and proliferation of audiences is causing many database educators to question what we should be teaching in our data-oriented courses, and what resources we should use to teach them.

Making the Right Move to Senior Researcher

I have been working on research in data management for the last 40 years. I like my job and my research institution (Inria, the French national research institute for computer science), which have offered me great opportunities to learn a lot, do good work, get to know smart and nice people and overall feel useful. However, since the early days of my mid-career, the research environment, including academia and industry, has certainly become more complex, making the move from junior (or pre-tenure) researcher to senior researcher quite challenging. Based on my experience, I review some of the main questions and challenges and give some hints on how to deal with them. I'll sometimes use stories and anecdotes to illustrate the point.

Sourav Bhowmick Speaks Out on Drawing Your Queries, Ethics, and Drawing for Ethics

Welcome to ACM SIGMOD Record's series of interviews with distinguished members of the database community. I'm Marianne Winslett, and today I have here with me Sourav Bhowmick, who is a professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, better known as NTU. Sourav is an ACM Distinguished Member. He received the VLDB Service Award, and a Lecturer of the Year Award from NTU. Sourav is also a member of the Initiative on Diversity and Inclusion in Database Conference Venues. His PhD is from NTU. So, Sourav, welcome!

Database Principles and Challenges in Text Analysis

A common conceptual view of text analysis is that of a two-step process, where we first extract relations from text documents and then apply a relational query over the result. Hence, text analysis shares technical challenges with, and can draw ideas from, relational databases. A framework that formally instantiates this connection is that of the document spanners. In this article, we review recent advances in various research efforts that adapt fundamental database concepts to text analysis through the lens of document spanners. Among others, we discuss aspects of query evaluation, aggregate queries, provenance, and distributed query planning.

Viktor Leis Speaks Out on Concurrency and Parallelism on Multicore CPUs

Welcome to ACM SIGMOD Record's series of interviews with distinguished members of the database community. I'm Marianne Winslett, and today I have here with me Viktor Leis who won the 2018 ACM SIGMOD Jim Gray Dissertation Award for his thesis entitled Query Processing and Optimization in Modern Database Systems. Viktor is now at the University of University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and his Ph.D. is from the Technical University of Munich, where he worked with Thomas Neumann and Alfons Kemper. So, Viktor, welcome.