Date: Wednesday, April 16th @ 4:30 pm
Location: Board Room, Room 6329, 6th floor Sennott Square Building, Pitt Campus
Speaker: Roger MacNicol, PhD Oracle
Title: Columnar Processing in Oracle: pivots and fractured mirrors

Abstract:
Starting with a brief history of columnar databases, Roger MacNicol will be walking us through Oracle’s high-level design choices in Hybrid Columnar and Pure Columnar database and some of the tradeoffs involved in RDBMS design. The talk will include showing the genesis of two of the key ideas in academic research.

Brief Bio:

• MA, D.Phil (Oxon)
• Small start-up at Oxford doing a 4th Generation Languages for Pick OS (multidimensional DB on raw iron)
• Moved to Boston, MA to work to add SQL support to uniVerse which was a port of Pick to Unix
• Manager then Architect for the Sybase IQ query engine and optimizer which was a Pure Columnar database (also first of Chair TPC-H)
• Oracle Dataguard in Nashua, NH the HA/DR system (just to do something different for a while but found it unchallenging)
• Oracle Data Systems Technology in Redwood Shores, CA
  • Lead engineer for the Table Scan Driver
  • Lead engineer for the thin rdbms layer that sits on the SAN in the Exadata offload server
  • Rewrote the Hybrid Columnar Compression query processing
  • Involved with projects on NVMe, NVRAM, and Hadoop (but nothing that has been disclosed)