Andreas Zimmerer from Snowflake will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Industry vs. Research DBMS: Exploring Key Differences” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 1 June 2023.

Abstract

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that offers a fully-managed service to store, process, and analyze large amounts of data. It is a relational database management system (DBMS) that is designed to be highly scalable, reliable, and secure. Snowflake is built on a unique multi-cluster shared data architecture that separates compute and storage, allowing users to easily scale computing resources up or down as needed, without affecting data availability or query performance.

Snowflake reliably handles high volumes of data and executes billions of queries every day. Building such a large system yields unique challenges and pitfalls, but also contains many well-known solutions. In this talk, we will explore the challenges and solutions involved in building a high-volume, query-intensive data management system such as Snowflake. Drawing from the experiences of individuals with academic backgrounds who have worked on both research and industry databases, we compare the similarities and differences between these two worlds. Through this comparison, we aim to provide valuable insights into the design and management of large-scale data processing systems, with a focus on features, workloads, optimizations, and operations.

Biography

Andreas Zimmerer is a graduate of the elite program Software Engineering. He works at Snowflake since 2021 on Query Processing.