Databases: Inside and Out
🙅 Canceled!
Too few people have signed up for the discussion rounds to go as planned and cover at least a reasonable number of the papers. As a result, we regretfully have to call off this seminar.
🧑🏫 Format
This is a “reading group” seminar, in which we meet as group once per week and discuss a different paper. So each week all participants read the same (portions of a) paper, make notes on the read content and jot down questions for the discussion. In each meeting one participant will lead the discussion — which entails that this participant instead writes a discussion guideline, in which they compile key points and questions for the discussion, and also follow up the meeting with a one-page (DIN A4) summary of the paper and the discussion had.
📅 Schedule
We will meet weekly on Wednesdays between 10:15 and 11:45 in the room B305.1 (Sand 13). The specific dates are as follows:
- 22.10.2025 – Kickoff Meeting/Introduction
- 29.10.2025 – Paper #11 (example session lead by us)
- 05.11.2025 – Paper #2
- 12.11.2025 – Paper #3
- 19.11.2025 – Paper #4
- 26.11.2025 – Paper #5
- 03.12.2025 – Paper #6
- 10.12.2025 – Paper #7
- 17.12.2025 – Paper #8
📑 Papers
In this seminar we will work our way through foundational papers in database execution engine design. You will read the papers that have defined the design of bleeding edge query engines that make efficient use of modern computer hardware.
| # | Title |
|---|---|
| 1 | Query evaluation techniques for large databases1 (G. Graefe, 1990) |
| 2 | MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution (P. Boncz et al., 2005) |
| 3 | Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware (T. Neumann, 2011) |
| 4 | These Rows Are Made for Sorting and That’s Just What We’ll Do (L. Kuiper et al., 2023) |
| 5 | Super-Scalar RAM-CPU Cache Compression (M. Zukowski et al., 2006) |
| 6 | Simple, Efficient, and Robust Hash Tables for Join Processing (A. Birler et al., 2024) |
| 7 | Robust External Hash Aggregation in the Solid State Age (L. Kuiper et al., 2024) |
| 8 | Morsel-Driven Parallelism: A NUMA-Aware Query Evaluation Framework for the Many-Core Age (T. Neumann et al., 2024) |