A Peek at the DB2 Optimizer Skunkworks

"skunkworks — Term for usually-secret high-pressure/high-tech research
group in a company or government, often populated by people who don't
see much sunlight or soap.
Hence the term skunkworks."
— Newton's Telecom Dictionary

What's cookin' in the DB2 Optimizer kitchen? Guy will give us a peek at
research prototypes that should soon help your DB2 workload achieve warp
speeds, including techniques for efficient sampling of data, new
advisors to help you physically design your database, and the latest on
the LEarning Optimizer, LEO, an optimizer that actually learns! He
promises to bathe first. 😉

Dr. Guy M. Lohman is Manager of Advanced Optimization in the Advanced
Database Solutions Department at IBM Research Division's Almaden
Research Center in San Jose, California, and has 21 years of experience
in relational query optimization. He is the architect of the Optimizer
of the DB2 Universal Data Base (UDB) for Linux, Unix, and Windows, and
was responsible for its development in Versions 2 and 5,as well as the
invention and prototyping of Visual Explain. During that period, Dr.
Lohman also managed the overall effort to incorporate into the DB2 UDB
product the Starburst compiler technology that was prototyped at the
Almaden Research Center. More recently, he was a co-inventor and
designer of the DB2 Index Wizard (DB2 Advisor), and co-founder of the
DB2 SMART (Self-Managing And Resource Tuning) project, part of IBM's
Autonomic Computing initiative. In 2002, Dr. Lohman was elected to the
IBM Academy of Technology. His current research interests involve query
optimization and self-managing database systems.