SQL Server 2012 introduced two innovations targeted for data warehousing workloads: column store indexes and batch (vectorized) processing mode. Together they greatly improve performance of typical data warehouse queries, routinely by 10X and in some cases by a 100X or more. The main limitations of the initial version are addressed in the upcoming release. Column store indexes are updatable and can be used as the base storage for a table. The repertoire of batch mode operators has been expanded, existing operators have been improved, and query optimization has been enhanced. This paper gives an overview of SQL Server's column stores and batch processing, in particular the enhancements introduced in the upcoming release.

Advances in hardware capacity, especially I/O devices such as cameras and displays, are driving the development of applications like high-definition video conferencing that have tight timing and CPU requirements. Unfortunately, current operating systems do not adequately provide the timing response needed by these applications. In this paper, we present a hierarchical scheduling model that aims to provide these applications with tight timing response, while at the same time preserve the strengths of current schedulers, namely fairness and efficiency. Our approach, called cooperative polling, consists of an application-level event scheduler and a kernel thread scheduler that cooperate to dispatch time-constrained application events accurately and with minimal kernel preemption, while still ensuring rigorously that all applications share resources fairly. Fairness is enforced in a flexible manner, allowing sharing according to a mixture of both traditional resource-centric metrics and new application-centric metrics, the latter being critical to support graceful application-level adaptation in overload. Unlike traditional real-time systems, our model does not require specification or estimation of resource requirements, simplifying its usage dramatically. Our evaluation, using an adaptive video application and a graphics server, shows that our system has event dispatch accuracies that are one to two orders of magnitude smaller than are achieved by existing schedulers. At the same time, our scheduler still maintains fairness and has low overhead.

Adding expressive haptic feedback to mobile devices has great potential to improve their usability, particularly in multitasking situations where one's visual attention is required. Piezoelectric actuators are emerging as one suitable technology for rendering expressive haptic feedback on mobile devices. We describe the design of redundant piezoelectric haptic augmentations of touchscreen GUI buttons, progress bars, and scroll bars, and their evaluation under varying cognitive load. Our haptically augmented progress bars and scroll bars led to significantly faster task completion, and favourable subjective reactions. We further discuss resulting insights into designing useful haptic feedback for touchscreens and highlight challenges, including means of enhancing usability, types of interactions where value is maximized, difficulty in disambiguating background from foreground signals, tradeoffs in haptic strength vs. resolution, and subtleties in evaluating these types of interactions.