Seminar Series Archive

I spent eight years adding database features to the Orleans object-oriented programming framework: replication, geo-distribution, transactions, and indexing. The challenge is how to do it when storage is a plug-in service that you don’t control. In this talk, I’ll describe the journey, summarizing the main technical ideas and recounting the ups and downs of a friendly collaboration with a product group. Along the way, I’ll discuss where database system research problems come from and the special challenges of industrial research. You can learn more about Orleans at https://dotnet.github.io/orleans/

Philip A. Bernstein is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. He has published over 150 papers and two books on the theory and implementation of database systems, especially on transaction processing and data integration, which are still a major focus of his research. He is an ACM Fellow, a AAAS Fellow, a winner of ACM SIGMOD’s Codd Innovations Award, a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences, and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. He received a B.S. degree from Cornell and M.Sc. and Ph.D. from University of Toronto.