Gong Going, Going, … Gong! (a.k.a. What I Wish Database Researchers Would Solve For Me) Mike Carey BEA Systems, Inc. May 2003

Time to Revisit DB Server Basics! Basic design of todays major DB server products dates back to the Client-Server Era (~early 1980s) –Revisit server architectures and their APIs! 1980s assumptions no longer hold (if they ever did) –Clients dont talk to DB servers – applications talk to DB servers (ex: SAP, J2EE apps, web services) –Application servers and applications end up redoing and/or working around DBMS features Security ends up in the application App servers or apps do connection pooling Apps use programming tricks / patterns to deal with disconnection, result pagination, etc.

Idea #1: Modernize DBMS APIs Revisit client/server state management –Everything must be lighter and cheaper! Connections (no pooling) User identity management Fix the client/server result handling model –Lightweight paginated results Ex: 1003 matching products – first 20, next 20, … Let client consume query results incrementally Dont hold critical DB resources (locks, buffers, …) –Optimistic updates (single- and multi-row) Read / think / update support for interactive web apps (e.g., disconnected rowsets) is ad hoc Now time to ignore [Agrawal, Carey, Livny 1987]? ( )

Idea #2: Be Middleware-Friendly DB servers ought to cooperate with middleware that does caching and needs to be change-aware –EJB servers, data integration servers, fancy apps –Note: Remember that the world is heterogeneous! Im not sure what this means, but it might mean –Support gazillions of triggers, and/or –Add external change eventstream APIs, and/or –Add native (standard) support for version stamps?