http://queue.acm.org/listing.cfm?item_topic=Databases&qc_type=topics_list&filter=Databases&page_title=Databases&order=desc http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3384393 The two papers I've chosen for this issue of acmqueue both challenge the way we think about and use data, though in very different ways. In "Stop Explaining Black-box Machine-learning Models for High-stakes Decisions and Use Interpretable Models Instead," Cynthia Rudin makes the case for models that can be inspected and interpreted by human experts. The second paper, "Local-first Software: You Own Your Data, in Spite of the Cloud," describes how to retain sovereignty over your data. Databases Tue, 18 Feb 2020 12:20:53 GMT Adrian Colyer 3384393 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3379349 Unless what you are processing, storing, or transmitting are, quite literally, strings that come from and are meant to be shown to humans, you should avoid processing, storing, or transmitting that data as strings. Remember, numbers are for computers, strings are for humans. Let the computer do the work of presenting your data to the humans in a form they might find palatable. That's where those extra bytes and instructions should be spent, not doing the inverse. Databases Mon, 13 Jan 2020 14:22:40 GMT George V. Neville-Neil 3379349 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3372732 Back when you had only one database for an application to worry about, you didn't have to think about partial results. You also didn't have to think about data arriving after some other data. It was all simply there. Now, you can do so much more with big distributed systems, but you have to be more sophisticated in the tradeoff between timely answers and complete answers. Databases Mon, 18 Nov 2019 16:04:09 GMT Pat Helland 3372732 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3371598 Procella is the latest in a long line of data processing systems at Google. What's unique about it is that it's a single store handling reporting, embedded statistics, time series, and ad-hoc analysis workloads under one roof. It's SQL on top, cloud-native underneath, and it's serving billions of queries per day over tens of petabytes of data. There's one big data use case that Procella isn't handling today though, and that's machine learning. But in 'Declarative recursive computation on an RDBMS... or, why you should use a database for distributed machine learning,' Jankov et al. make the case for the database being the ideal place to handle the most demanding of distributed machine learning workloads. Databases Wed, 06 Nov 2019 14:02:48 GMT Adrian Colyer 3371598 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3364509 In computing, there's an interesting trend where writing creates a need to do more work. You need to reorganize, merge, reindex, and more to make the stuff you wrote more useful. If you don't, you must search or do other work to support future reads. Databases Mon, 23 Sep 2019 15:58:19 GMT Pat Helland 3364509 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3357728 "We'll see the same kind of Cambrian explosion we witnessed in the web world once we started using mutualized infrastructure in public clouds and frameworks. It took only three weeks to learn enough Ruby on Rails and Heroku to push out the first version of a management system for that brokerage. And that's because I had to think only about the models, the views, and the controllers. The hardest part, of course, had to do with building a secure wallet." Databases Mon, 19 Aug 2019 13:25:37 GMT Shaul Kfir, Camille Fournier 3357728 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3339880 It turns out that the business value of ill-fitting data is extremely high. The process of taking the input data, discarding what doesn't fit, adding default or null values for missing stuff, and generally shoehorning it to the prescribed shape is important. The prescribed shape is usually one that is amenable to analysis for deeper meaning. Databases Wed, 05 Jun 2019 15:42:56 GMT Pat Helland 3339880 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3314115 New emerging systems and protocols both tighten and loosen our notions of identity, and that's good! They make it easier to get stuff done. REST, IoT, big data, and machine learning all revolve around notions of identity that are deliberately kept flexible and sometimes ambiguous. Notions of identity underlie our basic mechanisms of distributed systems, including interchangeability, idempotence, and immutability. Databases Tue, 19 Feb 2019 17:53:33 GMT Pat Helland 3314115 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3313377 Creating edge computing infrastructures and applications encompasses quite a breadth of systems research. Let's take a look at the academic view of edge computing and a sample of existing research that will be relevant in the coming years. Databases Tue, 12 Feb 2019 14:11:15 GMT Nitesh Mor 3313377 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3311889 Today's Information Age is creating new uses for and new ways to steward the data that the world depends on. The world is moving away from familiar, physical artifacts to new means of representation that are closer to information in its essence. We need processes to ensure both the integrity and accessibility of knowledge in order to guarantee that history will be known and true. Databases Wed, 06 Feb 2019 11:31:00 GMT Raymond Blum, Betsy Beyer 3311889