Amazon AWS - Database Services

In Palo Alto, CA next to the Four Seasons and in South Lake Union in Seattle, WA

The Amazon Aurora database service is hiring across all components (database engine, distributed storage, cluster management).

Aurora is a brand new database service that is compatible with MySQL and offers dramatic performance and durability advances. We are rethinking database architectures for the Cloud as we move from a design point focused on the sharing of scarce system resources to one where the central challenge is how to take advantage of their abundance.

More information on Aurora is here:

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/

http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/highly-scalable-mysql-compat...

The official job spec is here:

http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/321735/aws-software-development-...

Please ping me directly if you're interested: sailesk AT amazon.com

Sailesh Krishnamurthy

And so the wheel turns.

The original DB2 for VSE and VM (not DB2 for z-series/390) which was the productized version of System R did exactly this - compiled to native code. Subsequent DB2 implementations chose not to go down this path - even for single OS systems like DB2/390 and DB2/400.

In any event, I'm skeptical if this is going to make very much of a difference for the following reasons:

1. The time spent by the runtime/interpreter in "evaluating" the operators or expressions is really small relative to the heavy lifting of the actual relational operators to say nothing of I/O etc.

2. Most serious implementations don't really interpret the plan using a giant switch statement. For instance, with PostgreSQL, the interpreter puts in function pointers on first iteration. Thereafter it's only slightly worse than compiled native code.

SK

Re 2.: you can get significant improvements when compiling to native code. You still have to dereference those function pointers, which is essentially the same as a big switch statement (if not worse, your function pointers might be anywhere in the heap, not in your cache line).

When you compile to native code, you can essentially save the dynamic dispatch on query parts, plus all the other benefits you get from compilation.

E.g. if you do good type analysis, you can also compile to much more efficient data representations, which will again have benefits for memory access. The compiler can also inline code, do loop lifting, and all those goodies.

But overall I strongly agree with 1), any time spent doing execution is usually dwarfed by IO.

I checked my house and found that the 360 view is about 2.5 years old. I can tell this pretty accurately because of a remodel we were doing at the time.

I can confirm from recent personal experience that on U.S. domestic flights, luggage can and will be carried on the flight without the passenger on board.

1. Flying back to SF from the east coast on AA - got to JFK a trifle late and just missed the check-in deadline - mainly because the lady at the counter took an inordinate time and appeared to be flirting with the guy just ahead of us in line - yes I tried to check-in online but that wasn't possible because my outbound flight was on a different airline. Go figure. In any event, we were put on standby for the next flight but didn't get into the flight. I was resigned to take my luggage back and find a place to stay overnight in NYC when the gate attendant informed me that our bags were going with the flight and I could collect them at the SFO AA office ! We finally got back that night to LAX (after not making it through a wait on another flight) and then managed a Southwest flight back to SFO the next morning and sure enough our bags were waiting for us.

2. Last weekend, we were on a SW flight from SAN to SFO. Flight was delayed because of bad weather, and there was an additional delay close to the destination where we were not cleared for descent. By the time we were allowed to land, they had run out of fuel (!!) and landed the plane in SJC. Unbelievably they fueled up and took off and landed in SFO - about 3 hours later. Thankfully they let anyone who wanted to get off at SJC deplane and that's what we did. Gave us the time to get home, pick up my car from SFO, have lunch, etc. and went back to SFO to pick up our bags soon after the flight eventually landed. So in this case too, the flight took off with our bags and without us.