Leaving The Two Tier Architecture Behind by Hannes Muehleisen (Dijkstra Award 2024)

Speaker: Hannes Mühleisen Abstract: Analytical data management systems have long been monolithic monsters far removed from the action by ancient protocols. The common two- or three-tier architecture firmly placed data engines on dedicated, expensive hardware. Clients were reduced to politely asking for answers to their questions and then patiently waiting for an answer. High-efficiency data processing methods like vectorized processing and morsel-driven parallelism greatly increase the capabilities of data engines. This coincides with both a staggering growth in hardware capabilities and a leveling-off of useful dataset growth. Together, those developments allow moving analytical engines everywhere, if properly designed. The new class of in-process analytical engines allows them to move into any application process, which greatly streamlines data transfer, deployment, and management. This new class of systems also enables a whole new list of use cases, for example in-browser or edge OLAP, running SQL queries in lambdas and Big Data on laptops. Biography: Prof. Dr. Hannes Mühleisen is a creator of the DuckDB database management system and Co-founder and CEO of DuckDB Labs, a consulting company providing services around DuckDB. Hannes is also Professor of Data Engineering at Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and a senior researcher at the CWI Database Architectures Group. His main interest are - shockingly - analytical data management systems. Website: https://www.cwi.nl/en/events/dijkstra-awards/cwi-lectures-dijkstra-fellowship/ About the Dijkstra Fellowship The Dijkstra Fellowship is named after former CWI researcher Edsger W. Dijkstra, who was one of the most influential scientists in the history of CWI. Dijkstra developed the shortest path algorithm, among other contributions. The first Dijkstra Fellowships were awarded to David Chaum and Guido van Rossum in 2019. Dijkstra Fellowship 2024 for Marcin Żukowski Marcin Żukowski started his career at CWI. He did his MSc and PhD research on database management system architectures in our Database Architectures (DA) group. As a PhD student under the supervision of Peter Boncz, he developed the innovative concept of vectorized execution to improve the performance of database queries. This research received the DaMoN 2007 Best Paper Award and also the CIDR 2024 Test of Time Award, established by the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR).