The charter of the Microsoft Research Database Group is to increase the usefulness of database systems to users by creating, extending, and applying database technology. To that end, we consult with the database product groups at Microsoft and have initiated three exploratory research projects. We are located in Redmond, Washington, which is in the greater Seattle area.

Primary Contact: David Lomet
Bernstein, Phil	Goldstein, Jonathan	Larson, Paul	Lomet, David
Maier, David	Melnik, Sergey	Zhou, Jingren

• Phoenix: The long term goal is to improve application availability and error handling robustness. Initially, the project is focusing on exploiting database recovery techniques for enabling applications to survive system crashes. Two prototype systems have been built. Phoenix/ODBC provides persistent database sessions across database system failures. Phoenix/App provides persistent middle-tier applications across application server failures. David Lomet and Roger Barga work on the Phoenix project.
  
  
• Model Management: The long term goal is to make database systems easier to use for model-driven applications, such as design tools, message translators, and database translators. The project is currently focusing on algorithms for matching, merging, and generating models. Phil Bernstein and Sergey Melnik work on the project with Alon Halevy, Jayant Madhavan, Peter Mork, and Rachel Pottinger (Univ. of Washington), Erhard Rahm (Univ. of Liepzig), Christoph Quix and Lemonia Ragia (Univ. of Aachen), Suad Alagic (Univ. of S. Maine), and Rene Miller (Univ. of Toronto). ).
  
  
• QP Recycler: The goal of this project is to speed up processing of complex SQL queries by recognizing and exploiting commonalities within and among queries. One focus is on semantic caching, that is, caching intermediate or final query results and reusing them to compute later queries faster. A second focus is on exploiting materialized views for middle tier caching. Paul Larson and Jonathan Goldstein work on the QP Recycler project.
   
• Immortal DB - Transaction Time Database: : The Immortal DB project began in the fall of 2002. This project's goal is to provide the infrastructure for saving and indexing all prior states of a database.  Foundational work for this effort has been published: on indexing versions, and on choosing timestamps.  We are currently building a prototype system.  David Lomet and Roger Barga work on this project. 

Also see the Publications page for a complete listing of Microsoft Research Technical Reports page. Recent publications in the open literature from the Database group include the following:

Recent Papers

• Barga, R. and Shan, J. Flexible Coordination of E-Services. VLDB Workshop on Technologies for E-Services (TES-04) Toronto, Canada (August 2004) (to appear)
• Lomet, D. Robust Web Services via Interaction Contracts. VLDB Workshop on Technologies for E-Services (TES-04) Toronto, Canada (August 2004) (to appear) pdf, .09MB
• Barga, R., Lomet, D., Shegalov, G., and Weikum, G. Recovery Guarantees for Internet Applications. ACM Trans. on Internet Technology (2004) 289-328 pdf, .36MB
• Hongfei Guo, Per-Ake Larson , Raghu Ramakrishnan, Jonathan Goldstein , Relaxed Currency and Consistency: How to Say "Good Enough" in SQL. SIGMOD Conference Paris, France (June 2004) 815-826 pdf, .15M
• Hongfei Guo, Per-Ake Larson , Raghu Ramakrishnan, Jonathan Goldstein , Support for Relaxed Currency and Consistency Constraints in MTCache. SIGMOD Conference Paris, France (June 2004) 937-938 pdf, .15M
• Zhou, J., Ross, K., Buffering Database Operations for Enhanced Instruction Cache Performance, SIGMOD Conference, Paris, France (June 2004) pdf, .158MB
• Amira Rahal, Qiang Zhu, Per-ke Larson, Evolutionary Techniques for Updating Query Cost Models in a Dynamic Multidatabase Environment, VLDB Journal 13,2 (May 2004) 162-176
• Salzberg, B., Jiang, L., Lomet, D., Barrena, M., Shan, J., and Kanoulas, E. A Framework for Access Methods for Versioned Data. EDBT Conference, Heraklion, Greece (March 2004) 730-747 pdf, .237MB
• Per-Ake Larson , Jonathan Goldstein , Jingren Zhou , MTCache: Transparent Mid-Tier Database Caching in SQL Server. ICDE Conference Boston, MA (March 2004) 177-189 pdf, .14M
• Lomet, D. Simple, Robust and Highly Concurrent B-trees with Node Deletion. ICDE Conference, Boston, MA (March 2004) 18-28 Word, .15MB
• Barga, R., Chen, S. and Lomet, D. Improving Logging and Recovery Performance in Phoenix/App. ICDE Conference, Boston, MA (March 2004) 486-497 Word, .23MB
• Mork, P. and P. A. Bernstein. Adapting a Generic Match Algorithm to Align Ontologies of Human Anatomy. ICDE 2004 Boston, Mass. (March 2004) 787-790 PDF, 41KB)
• Zhou, J., Ross, K., Buffering Accesses to Memory-Resident Index Structures, VLDB Conference, Berlin, Germany (September 2003) pdf, .298MB
• Rachel Pottinger, Philip A. Bernstein: Merging Models Based on Given Correspondences. VLDB 2003 (September 2003).
• Halevy, A.Y., J. Madhavan, and P. A. P. A. Bernstein. Discovering Structure in a Corpus of Schemas. Data Engineering Bulletin, September 2003, 26-33 PS 77KB)
• Madhavan, J., P. A. Bernstein, K. Chen, A.Y. Halevy, and P. Shenoy. Corpus-based Schema Matching. IJCAI-03 Workshop on Information Integration on the Web (IIWeb-03), Acapulco, Mexico (August 2003) 59-66 (PDF, 105KB)
• Barga, R., Lomet, D., Paparizos, S., Yu, H., and Chandresekaran, S. Persistent Applications Via Automatic Recovery. IDEAS Conference,(July 2003) pdf, .147MB.
• Jiang, L., Salzberg, B., Lomet, D., and Barrena, M. The BTR-Tree: Path-Defined Version-Range Splitting in a Branched and Temporal Structure. Proceedings of the SSTD Conference. Santorini, Greece (July 2003). pdf, .268MB
• Zhou, J., Ross, K., Multi-resolution Block Storage Model for Database Design, IDEAS Conference, Hong Kong, China (June 2003) pdf, .124MB
• Sergey Melnik, Erhard Rahm, Philip A. Bernstein, Rondo: A Programming Platform for Generic Model Management, SIGMOD (June 2003), 193-204 pdf, .344MB
• Per-ke Larson, Jonathan Goldstein, Jingren Zhou, Transparent Mid_Tier Database Caching in SQL Server, SIGMOD Conference, (June 2003), 661.
• Lomet, D. and Tuttle, M. A Theory of Redo Recovery. SIGMOD Conference, San Diego, CA (June 2003) pdf, .132MB .
• Philip A. Bernstein: Applying Model Management to Classical Meta Data Problems. CIDR (January 2003), 209-220.
• Per-ke Larson, External Sorting: Run Formation Revisited, Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 15(4), (2003), 961-972.
• Philip A. Bernstein, Applying Generic Schema Management to Bioinformatics, OMICS A Journal of Integrative Biology 7, 1 (2003), 99-100.

Ph.D. Theses

• Jonathan Goldstein : Improved Query Processing and Data Representation Techniques, Ph.d. Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, October 1999.
• Roger Barga: A Reflective Framework for Implementing Extended Transactions, Ph.d Dissertation, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, 1999.
• Sergey Melnik: Generic Model Management: Concepts and Algorithms, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Leipzig, Springer LNCS 2967, 2004
• Jingren Zhou: Architecture-Sensitive Database Query Processing, Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, May 2004.

We actively participate in the database research community. Current activities include the following Conferences activities, and Editorships and Board Memberships:

• SIGMOD 2005:International Conference on Management of Data (2 on program committee, 1 on industrial committee)
• CIDR 2005: International Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (program committee)
• VLDB 2005: Very Large Databases Conference (industrial committee chair, program committee)
• SAC 2005: Internet Data Management track (program committee)
• SIGMOD 2004:International Conference on Management of Data (industrial committee chair, program committee)
• EDBT 2004: Conference on Extending Database Technology (2 on program committee)
• VLDB 2004: Very Large Databases Conference (2 on program committee)
• 2004 Dagstuhl Seminar on Atomicity in System Design and Execution: (co-organizer)
• MobiDE 2003: ACM Workshop on Data Engineering for Wireless and Mobile Access (program committee)
• IDEAS 2003:International Database Engineering and Applications Symposium (program committee)
• VLDB 2003: Very Large Databases Conference (industrial committee)
• DBPL 2003: International Conference on Database Programming Languages ( program committee)
• ICDCS 2003: International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (program committee)
• SIGMOD 2003:International Conference on Management of Data (2 on program committee)
• ICDE 2003: International Conference on Data Engineering (program committee)
• CIDR 2003: International Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (program committee)

• Distributed and Parallel Databases Journal: editorial board (2 members)
• Bulletin of the IEEE TC on Data Engineering: editor-in-chief
• International Conference on Data Engineering: Steering Committee (2 members)
• Information Systems: Editorial Advisory Board
• Sigmod Anthology: 2 associate editors
• Sigmod Digital Reviews: editorial board (2 members)
• VLDB Endowment: Board of Trustees member
• Computing Research Ass'n (CRA): Treasurer, Board of Directors member
• IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Data Engineering: treasurer, publications chair
• IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) Steering Committee: members(2)

• Suad Alagic (2000-2001), University of Southern Maine
• Paolo Atzeni (2003), University of Rome 3
• Christoph Freytag (2002), Humboldt University
• Wolfgang Lehner (2004), Dresden University of Technology
• Rene Miller (2001, 2002), University of Toronto
• Elizabeth O'Neil (2001), University of Massachusetts, Boston
• Patrick O'Neil (2001), University of Massachusetts, Boston
• Lemonia Ragia (2003), University of Aachen
• Erhard Rahm (2000), University of Leipzig
• Betty Salzberg (1996, 2002), Northeastern University
• Gerhard Weikum (1997, 2000, 2001), University of Saarland

A number of interns visit the Database Group each summer. Our current interns are listed below:

• Ahmed Ayad, University of Wisconsin
• David DeHaan, Waterloo University
• Mohamed Mokbel, Purdue University
• Peter Mork, University of Washington
• Alan Nash, University of California, San Diego (Microsoft Fellow)
• Jing Shan, Northeastern University

A full list of our prior interns is at Database Research Interns