Presidential Young Investigator Award (Computer and Information Science)

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This research is focused on improving database system performance, particularly for distributed databases, distributed transaction management and real-time database applications. The performance of concurrency control algorithms, distributed join algorithms and load balancing techniques for distributed database systems are all investigated, in addition to techniques such as main memory databases for achieving high performance. Another major aspect of the research is the development of extensible database systems, including the necessary storage management facilities and programming tools. The EXODUS system, under development with this research, is intended to support the rapid implementation of database management facilities for database applications that are poorly served by current relational database systems. The EXODUS group is building "database system generator" software, including a set of versatile kernel database facilities and software tools to simplify the construction of customized database management systems. Research on distributed database systems and their performance is vital for guiding the designers of future database systems. While relational database systems are now a commercial reality, and their distributed counterparts are starting to become available, significant challenges remain for understanding and improving their performance. Extensible database systems such as those investigated here are essential to go beyond relational databases and support a wide range of emerging database applications: computer assisted design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), computer-aided software engineering, scientific data management, image/voice data management, and data-intensive AI applications. The success of large-scale efforts in these areas will depend on flexible, high-performance data management facilities such as those developed in EXODUS project.