Extending Database Management System Technology

Jeffrey Naughton
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Over 45 years ago, W. McGee wrote a JACM paper describing some challenges in electronic data processing and outlining some initial ideas on how they might be solved. In the 45 intervening years, the DBMS community has made great strides in solving these problems, and has in the process created both a rich intellectual discipline and a multi-billion dollar commercial industry. In spite of this, or perhaps even because of it, we are at a crossroads. A number of high-profile domains have arisen (the Internet and Scientific Data Management are two good examples) in which, despite their being obvious candidates for the application of DBMS technology, to date database management systems have played only a minor role. In this talk I will briefly describe what I think are the reasons for the community’s success to date, why I say that today’s DBMS are “control freaks”, and why I think that the solution to expanding their applicability lies in learning to “play well with others.” This talk should be accessible to a general computer science audience.