Professor Madden offers a class in Database Systems (6.830).

In CarTel, we are building a system for managing data in the face of intermittent and variable connectivity. We are focusing, in particular, on automotive applications that involve high-rate sensing of road, traffic, and infrastructure conditions. The two key technologies we are developing are CafNet, a carry-and-forward network stack, and a distributed, signal-oriented, priority-driven query processor.

The goal of the H-Store project is to investigate how recent architectural and application trends affect the performance of online transaction processing databases (such as those that back many e-commerce sites, banks and reservation systems), and to study what performance benefits would be possible with a complete redesign of OLTP systems in light of these trends. Our idea is to build a main memory system with a dramatically simplified concurrency control and recovery model, which the goal of executing many times as many transactions per second as existing databases that rely on logging, expensive locking based conccurency control, and disk based recovery. Our early results show that a simple prototype built from scratch using modern assumptions can outperform current commercial DBMS offerings by around a factor of 80 on OLTP workloads. We are currently working to build a full-featured system that demonstrates these performance wins in a more robust prototype.

C-Store is a read-optimized relational DBMS that contrasts sharply with most current systems, which are write-optimized. Among the many differences in its design are: storage of data by column rather than by row, careful coding and packing of objects into storage including main memory during query processing, storing an overlapping collection of column-oriented projections, rather than the current fare of tables and indexes, a non-traditional implementation of transactions which includes high availability and snapshot isolation for read-only transactions, and the extensive use of bitmap indexes to complement B-tree structures.

WaveScope is a software platform to make it easy to develop, deploy, and operate wireless sensor networks that exhibit high data rates. In contrast to the "first generation" of wireless sensor networks that are characterized by relatively low sensor sampling rates, there are several important emerging applications in which high rates of hundreds to tens of thousands of sensor samples per second are common. These include civil and structural engineering applications, including continuous monitoring of physical structures, industrial equipment, and fluid pipelines; "Smart space" applications that continuously monitor sensors in a a space to support ubiquitous computing or security applications; and, scientific data gathering applications, such as outdoor acoustic monitoring systems for continuous habitat monitoring.