Microsoft recently introduced Azure Synapse Analytics, which offers an integrated experience across data ingestion, storage, and querying in Apache Spark and T-SQL over data in the lake, including files and warehouse tables. In this paper, we present our experiences with designing and implementing Hyperspace, the indexing subsystem underlying Synapse. Hyperspace enables users to build multiple types of secondary indexes on their data, maintain them through a multi-user concurrency model, and leverage them automatically---without any change to their application code---for query/workload acceleration. Many requirements of Hyperspace are based on feedback from several enterprise customers. We present the details of Hyperspace's underlying design, the user-facing APIs, its concurrency control protocol for index access, its index-aware query processing techniques, and its maintenance mechanisms for handling index updates. Evaluations over standard industry benchmarks and real customer workloads show that Hyperspace can accelerate query execution by up to 10x and in certain real-world workloads, even up to two orders of magnitude.

With the advances in processing, memory, and connectivity technologies, applications are becoming increasingly distributed, data-centric, and web based. These applications demand support for large number of users at high performance, requiring extreme scale, high availability, and low latency data access. Such applications are known as Extreme Transaction Processing (XTP) applications. Distributed Caching Platforms exploit the advances in the memory and networking technologies to fuse memory on multiple machines into a single unified global memory providing data access at low latencies. These Distributed Caching Platforms are evolving into in-memory data platforms for XTP applications. This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of Distributed Caching Platform technologies and their usage.

Modern Web applications built using technologies such as AJAX, Adobe flash and Microsoft Silverlight interact with data in a different way compared to previous-generation applications. Data is now a first-class construct that is exchanged over the web independently from presentation information. Astoria is both a set of patterns and an actual implementation of a programming interface for data in the Web. Astoria exposes data in a database over an HTTP interface and follows the REST architectural style for exploring and manipulating data. We demonstrate the URI patterns used by Astoria and their associated semantics, and the various data formats supported by the system. We explore specific requirements for the formats such as hyper-linking and usability for both retrieval and updates. We also demonstrate step by step how developers use Astoria to create custom data services on top of existing databases.

Advances in hardware, storage, devices, connectivity, and web technology are changing the way applications are designed, deployed, and managed. Applications are increasingly becoming data-centric and data is everywhere, and in all tiers (from the client to the cloud). Data across multiple tiers requires data access and management capabilities across these tiers.

Recent advances in device technology and connectivity have paved the way for next generation applications that are data-driven, whose data can reside anywhere, can be accessed at any time, from any client. Also, advances in memory technology are driving the capacities of RAM and Flash higher, and their costs down. These trends lead to applications that are mobile, embedded, and data-centric. This tutorial presents an overview of the mobile and embedded database systems and their applications.

Business process automation is what e-business is all about. The essence of an electronically powered business is its ability to streamline operations, making information available where and when it is needed, thus increasing customer satisfaction and improving efficiency and effectiveness. However, implementing a solution for automating business processes presents significant difficulties at the business and technical levels. Through the years, enterprises have adopted various means for automating processes, from hand-coding a solution to using integration products and middleware technologies. The key characteristics for each of these solutions are that they are proprietary, expensive and complex. Additionally, they require a lot of time and a high skill set in order to succeed in an integration initiative. Fortunately, recent technical developments have come together that promise a dramatic increase in the ability of businesses to describe, change, and execute business processes, both within the enterprise and across the networked enterprise. There will be a new breed of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) that support the management of end-to-end transactional and collaboration processes: discovery, design, deployment, execution, interaction, operation/maintenance, analysis and optimization. BPM is emerging as a key enabler of collaborative commerce. In this seminar, we will comprehensively look at the emerging field of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). We will study different steps of BPM, the underlying technologies (workflow, rules, data and application integration etc.), process based architectures and tools, and case studies illustrating the benefits of BPM.

Experienced panelist will share their views on application architecture, specially, as it relates to database systems. The discussion will focus on what technologies and mechanisms are necessary for developing web applications, and where these mechanisms should reside.

Over the last few years, Oracle has evolved its flagship relational database system into an Object-Relational system by adding an extensible type system, object storage, an object cache, an extensible query and indexing framework, support for multimedia datatypes, a server-based scalable Java virtual machine, as well as enhancing its SQL DDL and DML language. These extensions were done with the practical goal of bringing objects to mainstream use.

Object-relational database systems, a.k.a. “universal servers,” are emerging as the next major generation of commercial database system technology. Products from relational DBMS vendors including IBM, Informix, Oracle, UniSQL, and others, include object-relational features today, and all of the major vendors appear to be on course to delivering full object-relational support in their products over the next few years. In addition, the SQL3 standard is rapidly solidifying in this area. The goal of this tutorial is to explain what the key features are of object-relational database systems, review what today's products provide, and then look ahead to where these systems are heading. The presentation will be aimed at general SIGMOD audience, and should therefore be appropriate for users, practitioners, and/or researchers who want to learn about object-relational database systems.

This paper describes the implementation level design of an integrated concurrency control and recovery scheme based on the maintenance of multiple versions of data objects in a database. The concurrency control mechanism enhances parallelism by eliminating interference between retrieval and update transactions. The recovery mechanism permits efficient transaction and system recovery by keeping before-images of data objects at the page (block) level. This paper addresses the key technical problems in the implementation of such an integrated scheme. We present an efficient garbage collection algorithm for reclaiming storage space used by old versions of data objects that will no longer be accessed. We also propose an on-line backup algorithm that will permit the backup procedure to run in parallel with regular transactions. This integrated concurrency control and recovery scheme is being implemented in the LDM: the local database manager component of a distributed database management system, now being developed by Computer Corporation of America, that will support the ADAPLEX database application programming language [Chan81a, Smith81].