Research
Homeostasis: Datastores today rely on distribution and replication to achieve improved performance and fault-tolerance. But the correctness of many applications depends on strong consistency properties -- something that can impose substantial overheads, since it requires coordinating the behavior of multiple nodes. Homeostasis is a transaction processing system which minimizes the amount of coordination required among the nodes of a system without resulting in any external inconsistency. The key insight is to allow the state of the system to be internally inconsistent during execution, as long as this inconsistency is bounded and does not affect transaction correctness. In contrast to previous work, our approach uses program analysis to extract semantic information about permissible levels of inconsistency and is fully automated.
Quantum Databases: In many applications, transactions compete for scarce physical or virtual resources represented by data items in the database. Quantum database defers the making of choices in transactions until an application or user forces the choices by observation. Such latent binding allows more transactions to succeed in environments with high contention.
Youtopia: In this project, we are developing declarative mechanisms to support data-driven coordination. We believe that data-driven coordination is so pervasive that it deserves dedicated support through a clean, declarative abstraction. We are developing solutions to support declarative data-driven coordination (D3C) as a fundamental mode of data management.