XLDB

XLDB refers to eXtremely Large Data Bases. The definition of "extremely large" will clearly evolve with time. In 2007, XLDB refers to databases whose size is 1 petabyte or greater. XLDB builds on the long-established VLDB (Very Large Data Base) research and application domain. The VLDB Endowment has sponsored numerous annual conferences and proceedings (reference: http://www.vldb.org/). XLDB challenges include: access, indexing, analysis, mining, distribution, usability, replication, backup, and more.

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XLDB Workshop 2007

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In October 2007, scientists and database experts gathered at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center for the first-ever workshop on XLDB (reference: http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb07/). The workshop lasted one day, and consisted of only two contributed talks. The rest of the day consisted of 4 panel discussions with perspectives from these groups:

1) Scientists who develop, use, or plan to develop or use XLDB for their research.

2) Commercial users of XLDB.

3) Commercial vendors of database products.

4) Academic database researchers.

The motivation for the workshop is available from the workshop website (http://www-conf.slac.stanford.edu/xldb07/motivation.htm) and is reproduced here:

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Industrial and scientific datasets have been growing enormously in size and complexity in recent years. The largest transactional databases and data warehouses can no longer be hosted cost-effectively in off-the-shelf commercial database management systems. Non-standard techniques, including layers on top of commercial DBMSes or completely new DBMS development, have been required to enable the storage, processing, and querying of these extremely large databases. There are other forums for discussing very large databases and data warehouses, but they typically deal with problems occurring at smaller scales and do not always focus on practical solutions or influencing DBMS vendors. Given the relatively small (but highly influential and growing) number of users with these databases and the relatively small number of opportunities to exchange practical information related to DBMSes at extremely large scale, a workshop that brings together both users and vendors will be valuable.

The XLDB research community that formed at the October 2007 SLAC workshop will plan future activities, which may include workshops, conferences, research proceedings, and contributions to this Wikipedia community forum.

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XLDB Research Groups

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* http://www.lsst.org/
* http://cdsweb.cern.ch/
* http://xldb.fc.ul.pt/

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Further reading

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* Becla, J., & Wang, D. L. 2005, "Lessons Learned from Managing a Petabyte", downloaded from http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/10750/slac-pub-10963.pdf on 2007-11-25.

* Adesanya, A. et al. 2003, "On the Verge of One Petabyte – the Story Behind the BaBar Database System," Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0306020.

* Becla, J., et al. 2006, "Designing a multi-petabyte database for LSST," http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0604112.

* Bell, G., Gray, J., & Szalay, A. 2005, "Petascale computations systems: Balanced cyberinfrastructure in a data-centric world," http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0701165.

* Duellmann, D. 1999, "Petabyte Databases", ACM SIGMOD Record, vol. 28, p. 506, http://www.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/9906/index.html#TutorialSessions.

* Hanushevsky, A., & Nowak, M. 1999, "Pursuit of a Scalable High Performance Multi-Petabyte Database", 16th IEEE Symposium on Mass Storage Systems, pp. 169-175, http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/217883.html.

* Shiers, J., "Building Very Large, Distributed Object Databases", downloaded from http://wwwasd.web.cern.ch/wwwasd/cernlib/rd45/papers/dbprog.html on 2007-11-25.