This talk will take place in CSE 403 instead of our usual lecture room.
Dr. David Lomet, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA lomet@microsoft.com
Dependability, Abstraction, and Programming
In this talk, we look at what is required to produce programs that are dependable. Dependability requires more than just high availability. Rather, a program needs to be right as well, solving the problem for which it was designed. This requires a program development infrastructure that can, by means of appropriate abstractions, permit the programmer to focus on his problem, and not be distracted by systems issues that arise when high availability is required. We discuss the attributes of good abstractions. We then illustrate this in the programming of dependable systems. Our abstraction is a transparently persistent stateful programming model for use in the web enterprise setting where exactly-once execution is required. Work on this abstraction is reviewed. The new technical meat of the paper is in (1) capturing precisely what is required for redo recovery support this abstraction, (2) describing how to reduce the performance cost of using the abstraction; (3) extending the flexibility of using this abstraction; (4) and showing how to exploit this flexibility to achieve dependability.
David Lomet is a principal researcher and manager of the Database Research
Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond, Washington since 1995. Prior to joining
Microsoft, he spent six years at Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge
Research Lab (CRL), after having spent a year and a half working in Digital's
database product group. Earlier in his career, he was a research staff member
at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown and subsequently a
professor of Information Technology at the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies.
Dr. Lomet spent a sabbatical at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne working on
software reliability with Brian Randell. He has a Ph.D in Computer Science from
the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Lomet has done research and product engineering in the areas of machine
architecture, programming languages, and distributed systems. He is most
known for his work in database systems and transactions. He is one of the
inventors of the transaction concept. His work in database systems has focussed
on access methods, concurrency control, and recovery. He has published over
90 papers and has over 35 patents. He has twice been an author of papers selected as
"best paper" at SIGMOD conferences.
Dr. Lomet has served on many conference program committees, including the major
database conferences (SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE...). He was the program
chair for the FODO'93 conference, ICDE'2000 program co-chair, ICDE'2001
conference co-chair, and VLDB'2006 core track chair. Dr. Lomet has
served as editor-in-chief of the Data Engineering Bulletin since 1992 and has been
an editor of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, the VLDB Journal, and the
Journal of Distributed and Parallel Databases. He is an IEEE Golden Core Member
and has received IEEE Outstanding Contribution and Meritorious Service Awards.
Dr. Lomet is a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE.