I am a principal researcher and manager of the Database Group at Microsoft Research.

Short Biography

David Lomet has been a principal researcher managing the Microsoft Research Database Group at Microsoft Research since 1995. Earlier, he spent seven and a half years at Digital Equipment Corporation. He has been at IBM Research in Yorktown and a Professor at Wang Institute. Dr. Lomet spent a sabbatical at University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne working with Brian Randell. He has a Computer Science Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Lomet has done research and product development in architecture, programming languages, and distributed systems. His primary interest is database systems, focusing on access methods, concurrency control, and recovery. He is one of the inventors of the transaction concept and is an author of over 90 papers and 40 patents. Two papers won SIGMOD "best paper" awards.

Dr. Lomet has served on program committees, including SIGMOD, PODS, VLDB, and ICDE. He was ICDE'2000 PC co-chair and VLDB 2006 PC core chair. He is a member of the ICDE Steering Committee and VLDB Board. He is editor-in-chief of the Data Engineering Bulletin since 1992 and past editor of ACM TODS and the VLDB Journal. Dr. Lomet is IEEE Golden Core Member and received IEEE Outstanding Contribution and Meritorious Service Awards. Dr. Lomet is both ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.

Projects

• Deuteronomy: Traditionally, a DBMS kernel has recovery, concurrency control and access method code tightly bound together. We factor the kernel into a transactional component (TC) that knows about transactions and their “logical” concurrency control and undo/redo recovery, and a data component (DC) that knows about the access methods and supports a record oriented interface with atomic operations. The interaction of the components is governed by a contract or covenant.
• Immortal DB: 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 have built a prototype system that includes indexing, version compression, and bad user transaction recovery. A major goal has been to provide performance close to that of an unversioned database.
• Phoenix Persistent Applications: The Phoenix goal is to improve application availability and error handling robustness. The project exploits 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.