1998 - 1999 CS Annual Report                                                                  Faculty
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Praveen Seshadri

Assistant Professor
praveen@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/praveen/praveen.html

PhD Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, 1996

I am interested in investigating new directions in dbms
architectures. Four large research projects are being
explored by the Cornell Database Systems group. 

The Cornell Predator project  (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/predator) has built a
full-fledged object-relational database system. The system
demonstrates the use of Enhanced Abstract Data Types

 praveen.tif (271694 bytes)
(E-ADTs), resulting in order-of-magnitude performance improvements. Many commercial database vendors have added object support recently, and this research develops a mechanism to make these systems efficient as well. The codebase is freely available as a research vehicle and is being widely used at other universities. 

The Cornell Jaguar project (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/jaguar) is extending Predator with mobile query processing. The motivation is to eliminate traditional client-server barriers that are obstacles to high-performance query processing. There are two aspects to Jaguar: migrating client functionality to the database server, and vice versa. We use Java to specify portable representations of query components. 

The COUGAR project (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/cougar) is the Cornell University Gadget Archive. The motivation is simple: "data moves and so should the database engine". This project focuses on mobile devices and gadgets and is developing a comprehensive infrastructure in which millions of gadgets can be organized into mobile databases. 

QuO (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/quo): This is a new project exploring non-traditional directions in database query optimization. As an initial focus, we are developing optimization techniques that account for variations in run-time execution environments. 

Professional Activities  
  • Program committee: VLDB Conference, Edinburgh, Scotland, Sept. 1999; IEEE Mobicom Workshop on Mobile Database Systems, Seattle, WA, Aug 1999  
  • Panel chair: Panel on Mobile Databases at ACM SIGMOD, Philadelphia, PA, June 1999 
Lectures  
  • Enhancing Complex Data Types: Invited Lecture. OCATE Seminar (OGI and PSU), Portland, OR, March 1999. 
Publications 
  • Client-site query extensions. Proc. ACM SIGMOD (June 1999) (with S. Mayr). 
  • Least expected cost query optimization: An exercise in utility. Proc. ACM PODS (June
    1999) (with F. Chu and J. Halpern).  
Software 
  • The Cornell Predator database system (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/database/predator)
    The Cornell Jaguar project demonstration at ACM SIGMOD, Philadelphia, PA, June 1999