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Many database companies have research labs. It allows you to explore ideas, unorthodox concepts, and parts of the design space that may never be reflected in an
by jandrewrogers 2mo ago
Many database companies have research labs. It allows you to explore ideas, unorthodox concepts, and parts of the design space that may never be reflected in an actual product. Or to figure out how to solve specific hard problems that you come across with neither a good solution nor proof of impossibility in literature.
This is essential for a company that wants to stay on the frontier of database tech.
- bedman12345 2mo agoWhich database companies have research labs? AFAIK amazon, snowflake, databricks, google and SAP don’t have a research lab dedicated to databases. They have some people that are paid to do research but there does not seem to be an IBM Almaden anywhere in the world.
- senderista 2mo agoThere is MongoDB Labs FWIW (also Oracle Labs but I think that's just rebranded Sun Labs and not sure how much DB research happens there).
- pjmlp 2mo agoOne example of what they do there is GraalVM, which started as MaximeVM at Sun Labs, although they don't share code per se only the research. Or how Solaris eventually became the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging.
- senderista 2mo agoI see a lot of concurrency papers from Oracle Labs but not DB papers FWIW.
- pjmlp 2mo agoSecret sauce. Contrary to most beliefs, there are still features on Oracle, SQL Server, DB 2, and similar, not yet available on Postgres. Not having DB papers is certainly one way for Oracle to keep it that way.