sql

By 2001 Jim Gray had already won the Turing Award for transaction processing. Butler Lampson’s introduction describes TP as “pixie dust”: sprinkle it on a boring, non-fault-tolerant program and it becomes fault-tolerant and load-balanced. Gray then spends an hour on a different subject, astronomy. Working with Alex Szalay’s group at Johns Hopkins and with Caltech, he had been loading the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) into SQL Server, and this lecture is an early report on that project, the SkyServer....

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week. Area: Databases. Author: E. F. Codd (IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377–387 DOI: 10.1145/362384.362685 Why the paper still matters Codd’s paper is eight pages long, contains no system, no benchmark, and no evaluation section. It would very likely struggle to get past a modern program committee. It is also, by a wide margin, the most economically consequential paper in the history of computer science — the entire relational database industry, SQL, the query optimizer as a discipline, and by extension most of what we call “data infrastructure” descend from it....