Catching the heartbeat of the data management community: perspectives on exciting and controversial topics, from and for the ACM SIGMOD community.

Category: Systems

Where Quantum Actually Meets the Database (and Where It Doesn’t)

by Ibrahim Sabek on Sep 21, 2026 | Categories: Databases, Systems

Quantum computing might be the most famous technology that almost nobody has actually used. It shows up in movie plots, in nervous headlines about “the end of encryption,” and in the occasional promise that it will soon cure diseases, design new materials, and untangle city traffic, all at once. If…

Data cleaning is a machine learning problem that needs data systems help!

by Ihab Ilyas on Apr 18, 2018 | Categories: Big Data, Machine Learning, Systems

When dealing with real-world data, dirty data is the norm rather than the exception. We continuously need to predict correct values, impute missing ones, and find links between various data artefacts such as schemas and records. We need to stop treating data cleaning as a piecemeal exercise…

Thinking Spatial

by Mohamed Mokbel on Oct 6, 2016 | Categories: Databases, Recommendations, Spatial, Systems

Self-driving cars, ride-sharing service (e.g., Uber and Lyft), and Pokemon Go are just three examples of recent disruptive applications that gained huge market share and publicity. It is expected that each self-driving car will generate 2 PB of data per year, with 10 Million of such cars by 2020.…

Data systems that are easy to design*

by Stratos Idreos on Jun 8, 2015 | Categories: Systems

We keep designing new data systems over and over again. We ask two questions in this post: 1) Is this sustainable in the long term? 2) Can we make this process faster? The need for new data system designs “Big data” may be mostly a marketing term as opposed to a research one but it...