What is an exciting area of database research?

Question

I'm in graduate school and about to start a project related to databases. The professor has provided a list of topics for us to choose from, but we are also free to suggest something else we're personally interested in. The basic format of the project is quite simple:

1. I'll study 2-3 research papers related to the area I end up choosing
2. I'll prepare a presentation (where "presentation" is somewhat loosely defined)
3. I'll prepare a 4-5 page summary of what I have learned

I really want to find a topic that is exciting and that would ideally make a good presentation (I would love some form of a "working demo"). So far my search has left me intrigued about the Stanford Entity Resolution Framework. I figured StackOverflow would be an excellent resource to tap for this. What are some exciting areas of database research that you know of? Thank you for taking the time to help me out.

Answer 1

NoSQL is getting a lot of attention. You can't seem to go on proggit or hacker news without some mention of MongoDB, CouchDB or something of the like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL

Answer 2

I think the main aim is in scalability.

Look at these industry real-life databases:

• BigTable (Google)
• Cassandra (Facebook), and
• Dynamo (Amazon).

That should give you good background for presentation.

Answer 3

Might I suggest a couple:

• Formal object-oriented entities. Entities (tables) that can naturally extend other entities,
• Hash O(1) indexing,
• Single-level-store (SLS) tablespaces
• Kernel-level integration (think AS/400)

Answer 4

Semantics-based storage issues (like the one SERF addresses, but also all kinds of semantic web related storage possibilities) are very hot in academia right now (a bit less so in industry, as the returns don't really promise to come anytime soon;-).

Non-relational, highly scalable databases are extremely hot in industry research, but not so much in academia. So, if you're looking mostly for academic successes, peer-reviewed journal publication opportunities, future thesis work, etc, they may not be your best bet (they might be in some cases, esp. if you're just going for a MS, not a PhD, and care about superb internship opportunities in industry research and development, hot near-future employment opportunities in the field, etc, etc).

A great place to research "what's hot right" in a mix of academia (mostly) and industry R & D (a reasonable amount) are the appropriate ACM SIGs. I'm sure you know about SIGMOD, but SIGIR, SIGKDD, and (for specialized areas of storage) several others of the SIGs, can very well be interesting, too.

Answer 5

Negative Databases

In a negative database, the negative image of a set of data records is represented rather than the records themselves.