The Practical Challenges of Managing Big Data in the Cloud Amr El Abbadi Univ. of California Santa Barbara, USA

Biography:

Over the past few decades, database and distributed systems researchers have made significant advances in the development of protocols and techniques to provide data management solutions that carefully balance three major requirements when dealing with critical data: high availability, fault-tolerance, and data consistency. However, in recent years, data requirements have been unprecedented, especially in terms of data availability and system scalability for Internet scale enterprises that provide services and cater to millions of users. Cloud computing has emerged as an extremely successful paradigm for deploying Internet and Web-based applications. Scalability, elasticity, pay-per-use pricing, and autonomic control of large-scale operations are the major reasons for the successful widespread adoption of cloud infrastructures. In this lecture, we will analyze the design choices that allowed modern NoSQL data management systems (key-value stores) to achieve orders of magnitude higher levels of scalability compared to traditional databases. Although key-value stores provide high availability, they are not ideal for applications that require consistent data. More recently, there has been a gradual shift to provide transactions with strong consistency. We will analyze the need and the revival of consistent database management systems in large cloud settings. We discuss several state of the art Cloud based data management systems, which provide transactional guarantees on collections of data items, while attempting to ensure efficiency and scalability. Of particular interest are applications which require geo-replicated data management for fault-tolerance. We will therefore explore the data management design space for geo-replicated data and discuss different approaches for replicating data in multi-datacenter environments.

Abstract:

Amr El Abbadi is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his B. Eng. from Alexandria University, Egypt, and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Prof. El Abbadi is an ACM Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and IEEE Fellow. He was Chair of the Computer Science Department at UCSB from 2007 to 2011. He has served as a journal editor for several database journals, including, The VLDB Journal, IEEE Transactions on Computers and The Computer Journal. He has been Program Chair for multiple database and distributed systems conferences. He currently serves on the executive committee of the IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering (TCDE) and was a board member of the VLDB Endowment from 2002 to 2008. In 2007, Prof. El Abbadi received the UCSB Senate Outstanding Mentorship Award for his excellence in mentoring graduate students. In 2013, his student, Sudipto Das received the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award. Most recently Prof. El Abbadi was the co-recipient of the Test of Time Award at EDBT/ICDT 2015. He has published over 300 articles in databases and distributed systems and has supervised over 30 PhD students.