Here is the abstract of Glenn Paulley's keynote speech to CIKM 2010 - 19th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management in Toronto, October 26 to 30, 2010:

Turning Dark Clouds into Silver Linings

Data management services are ubiquitous in the industry. With some important exceptions, relational database systems are the platform upon which many applications depend, including mainframe servers, web browsers, and handheld devices. The vast majority of these installations run unattended. Consequently, self-management, self-tuning, and self-healing features are of great importance to these systems. Cloud computing architectures, due to their inherent dynamics, add another level of flexibility - and complexity - to the problems of database self-management.

However, application developers continue to experience unpredictable performance and reliability issues with the application's software stack. Over the past few years, these issues have led to a variety of proposals to address the problem, including weak consistency models and the abandonment of SQL as a data management sub-language.

In this talk I'll present an overview of the data management problems in relational database systems that are exacerbated by cloud computing architectures, discuss the state-of-the-art in self-management technology, and conclude with some ideas for future research to address these problems.

Speaker Information

Glenn Paulley is a Director with Sybase iAnywhere Engineering, where he manages the research and development team responsible for query processing in SQL Anywhere, Sybase's self-managing relational database server. He joined Sybase iAnywhere in 1995. During his 20-year industrial career Glenn has held previous positions at Amdahl Corporation and at a large Canadian insurance company. He holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. His research interests include software usability, query optimization, information systems architecture, design of Management Information Systems, topics in systems analysis, interfaces to database systems, database query languages, user models, multidatabase systems, and indexing techniques.