Communications - December 2008

ACM

Transactions on

Reconfigurable

Technology and

Systems

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This quarterly publication is a peer-reviewed and archival journal that covers reconfigurable technology, systems, and applications on reconfigurable computers. Topics include all levels of reconfigurable system abstractions and all aspects of reconfigurable technology including platforms, programming environments and application successes.

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a related collection of things such as orders or documents.

So you have to have a query language such as XQuery that will be able to navigate and to ask set-oriented questions about this new kind of data. That opens up a different repertoire of data access techniques and requires enhancement of the query optimization process. But I think it’s absolutely essential to continue on the path of automatic query optimization rather than put programmers back into the game of understanding exact data structures and doing the navigation in the application program manually. That’s simply cost-prohibitive.

Jh Looking at new optimization techniques, feedback-directed systems, and dynamic execution time decisions—all significant areas of continuing research—what do you see as the most important next steps looking out, say, five years or so?

Ps I think the cost of ownership is on every customer’s mind, not just because of the economic downturn that some of them are still in or have just experienced, but because the cost of processors, disk space, and memory are all going down—and the cost of labor is going up.

Furthermore, you have to look at the ratio of how many administrators you need to take care of a terabyte worth of data. Unless you can dramatically improve that ratio, as you accumulate more and more terabytes of data, pretty soon you’re looking at employing half the planet to administer it. So we are inventing ways to make administrators capable of handling 20, 100, 1,000 times more data than they do today.

At the same time, we’re under pressure to incorporate, search, understand, and take advantage of information that’s in this more unstructured form—email, for example. Companies want to be able to look at email or customer service files to give their customers better service, and have to manage and understand and analyze more kinds of information. As we look at what it’s going to take to do that, we have to change the game in terms of the cost of organizing, administering, and searching this data.

Jh I’ve seen two pictures painted of the future of unstructured data. One of

them has file systems augmented with search appliances, and another is based upon an expanding role of structured stores that are much more flexible and much more capable of dealing with dynamic schema and content. Is there a role for file systems and search appliances? Where do you see this playing out?

Ps I don’t think that any current or future data storage mechanism will replace all the others. For example, there are many cases where file systems are just fine and that’s all you need, and people are perfectly happy with that. We have to be able to reach out to those data sources with a meta-engine that knows how to reach and access all those different data repositories and understands all the different formats—.jpg, .mpg, .doc—and knows how to interpret that data.

The notion of an intergalactic-size, centralized repository is neither reasonable nor practical. You can’t just say to a customer, “Put all your data in my repository and I’ll solve all your problems.” The right answer from my perspective is that customers will have their data in a variety of places under a variety of applications in file systems and database engines. They’re not going to centralize it in one kind of data store. That’s just not practical. It’s not economically feasible

So, file systems will still be around. They may get enhanced with special search techniques as we have more capability and processing power in RAID systems and disk servers, file servers,