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Current Research in Databases
Block Seminar
Overview
This seminar builds upon our courses "Big Data Engineering" and "Database Systems". We will discuss recent research papers from SIGMOD, PVLDB, and CIDR. Though this seminar is meant to be one of the few seminars at the department not treating AI, we cannot fully guarantee that we might incidentally touch AI topics.
Preliminaries
To succeed in this seminar, you must have passed our base lecture "Big Data Engineering" and may already attended our core lecture "Database Systems". The knowledge that you acquired in this lecture enables you to comprehend and professionally present your assigned paper.
Schedule
- Every student is assigned one paper to present at the end of the term. The presentation is expected to take 25 minutes to present the contents of the paper plus around 5 minutes of Q&A afterwards. The presentation mostly determines your final seminar grade.
- We form "peer groups" of 2-3 students.
- Every student must write a summary of each of their peer's papers. Summaries must be 2-3 pages, DIN A4, 11pt; not less, not more. These summaries must be submitted during the lecture period. Summaries are graded and used as tie-breaker for your final seminar grade. Writing the summaries is mandatory to pass the seminar. The summaries are made accessible to all other students of the seminar and aid your peers in preparing their presentation.
- We will have five mandatory meetings during the lecture period:
- the kick-off meeting, where we provide an overview of the papers (start of lecture period)
- a meeting with your advisor to discuss the content of the paper assigned to you (November)
- a meeting with your peer group after you have submitted your peer reviews, where you can interact with your peers to resolve open questions (December)
- a short lecture by Prof. Dittrich on how to present (December)
- a meeting with your advisor to present a draft of your presentation (January) - The presentations will take place in a block format after the lecture period in a block style (TBD via doodle).
Papers
Below follows the list of papers that we will discuss in this seminar. The list is ordered arbitrarily. This is not necessarily the order in which you will present the papers.
- Neumann et al. - RDF-3X: a RISC-style Engine for RDF (PVLDB 2008) - JD
- Deshpande - Beyond Relations: A Case for Elevating to the Entity-Relationship Abstraction (CIDR 2025) - JD
- Armenatzoglou et al. - Amazon Redshift Re-invented (SIGMOD 2022) - JD
- Behm et al. - Photon: A Fast Query Engine for Lakehouse Systems (SIGMOD 2022) - JD
- Selinger et al. - Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System (SIGMOD 1979) - JD
- Justen et al. - POLAR: Adaptive and Non-invasive Join Order Selection via Plans of Least Resistance (PVLDB 2024) - SR
- Zhao et al. - Debunking the Myth of Join Ordering: Toward Robust SQL Analytics (SIGMOD 2025) - SR
- Birler et al. - Robust Join Processing with Diamond Hardened Joins (PVLDB 2024) - SR
- Wang et al. - Efficient Indexing for Flexible Label-Constrained Shortest Path Queries in Road Networks (SIGMOD 2025) - SR
- Heinrich et al. - How Good are Learned Cost Models, Really? Insights from Query Optimization Tasks (SIGMOD 2025) - LG
- Fischer et al. - SQL Engines Excel at the Execution of Imperative Programs (PVLDB 2024) - LG
- Arch et al. - The Key to Effective UDF Optimization: Before Inlining, First Perform Outlining (PVLDB 2024) - LG
- Yan et al. - Tabular: Efficiently Building Efficient Indexes (PVLDB 2025) - LG
- Wu et al. - An Empirical Evaluation of In-Memory Multi-Version Concurrency Control (PVLDB 2022) - SY
- Tang et al. - Ad Hoc Transactions in Web Applications: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (SIGMOD 2022) - SY
- Schmidt et al. - Two Birds With One Stone: Designing a Hybrid Cloud Storage Engine for HTAP (PVLDB 2024) - SY
- Freitag et al. - Memory-optimized multi-version concurrency control for disk-based database systems (PVLDB 2022) - SY
All papers are available in the materials section.