Technofeel Things that keep me up late

VLDB 2009: Part 1

I have the chance to attend a few conferences each year all around the world. These events are an invaluable opportunity to learn about the latest innovations and get insights from some of the most respected people in our domains.

This week I am attending Very Large Data Base 2009, a major meeting for people that deal with huge amount of data or concerned about databases performances. This event takes place each year in different cities, but we have the chance to host the 09 edition in Lyon, gathering all these brilliant people in France. Almost 700 attendees from 44 countries came up here and so far it was worth it.

The conference takes place till Friday, so I'll only share my thoughts on the past two days. First, the event is pretty well packed up. Everything from the place, the food, the quality of speakers to the variety of selected papers is pretty attractive. As usual, you are given a guide of the conference, but this one is particularly well made, with every talks abstracts, map of the city, side activities, etc... Special cool thing: All the papers are available on a USB key available in your attendee package, thus saving trees, time and money. Pretty cool.

Yesterday was a day of workshops. I attended two of them, the USETIM (Using Search Engine Technologies for Information Management), and the BIRTE (Enable Real-Time Business Intelligence). USETIM was chaired by Gregory GREFENSTETTE, Exalead's Chief Officer of Science. We saw some very interesting presentations, including big actors like Microsoft, with the demo of their Symphony platform that allows building a custom search engine (both in terms of sources and display) in a simple drag and drop interface. Unfortunately, the two talks of BIRTE I attended were not that interesting, mostly driven by industrial products.

Today began with a keynote of Raghu Ramakrishnan, Chief Scientist for Audience and Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, that talked about key-value stores, one of my favorite subject. He gave a presentation that could have been the full length version of my talk at Ignite Velocity 2009 (San Jose): Why these simple stores were created, what are the trade off of using such technologies, the details about Yahoo! PNUTS implementation and a comparison with other systems.

Another highlights of the day include a presentation from another Yahoo! fellow about "Indexing Boolean Expressions", a session on Data Visualization (largely inspired of the excellent Visual Display of Quantitative Information), and finally a paper describing a good alternative to B+Trees (a well known data structure in indexing technologies) for Flash devices and SSD drives: Lazy Adaptive Trees. Congratulation to these authors.

Beside that I really like the city, Lyon is a beautiful place ! The borders of the Rhone river are lovely and full of joyful people enjoying a little glass of wine after work, very pleasant