Title: Converged Analytics and Cloud-Native Architectures

Time: 12-1 PM Pacific Time, Friday November 20th, 2020

Talk recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzjlYEZMdY0&feature=youtu.be

Abstract: Digital transformation is a popular phrase these days.  In essence, the idea is gather all relevant data (including real-time telemetry, operational data, historical data, social-media streams, and more) to understand any facet of an enterprise that is of interest, and to use the resulting insights to implement changes that optimize the desired outcomes.  The idea is not new—cavemen no doubt observed that outrunning companions mattered more than outrunning sabertooth tigers and chose companions accordingly—and has motivated relational warehouses, data marts and data lakes.

The underlying technology, however, has been evolving over the past decade.  From big data to cloud, we’ve seen factors sparking big changes.  As data grew in diversity, scale and importance, a wide range of analytic tools gained adoption.  Now, we’re seeing a trend towards simplification.  Enterprise-grade security and governance are challenging in an environment of several siloed analytic tools, and there is a trend towards converged analytic hubs, which deeply integrate many diverse capabilities.  The cloud has accelerated this trend in two ways.  First, it has motivated fundamental architectural changes to leverage cloud elasticity.  Second, it has created a window of opportunity for customers to modernize as they migrate from existing on-prem environments.

In this talk, we will discuss converged analytics using Azure Synapse as a concrete example; the Polaris paper from VLDB 2020 would be a good pre-read.

Bio: Raghu Ramakrishnan is CTO for Data, and a Technical Fellow at Microsoft. From 1987 to 2006, he was a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he wrote the widely used text “Database Management Systems”.  In 1999, he founded QUIQ, a company powering crowd-sourced question-answering as a cloud service. He joined Yahoo! in 2006 as a Yahoo! Fellow, and served as Chief Scientist for the portal, cloud and search divisions. Ramakrishnan has received several awards, including the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, 10-year Test-of-Time Awards from the ACM SIGMOD, ACM SOCC, ICDT and VLDB conferences, the IIT Madras Distinguished Alumnus Award, the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE and has served as Chair of ACM SIGMOD.