Vertica Sponsors First Annual SIGMOD Programming Contest

$5000 prize to develop best indexing system for main memory data

BILLERICA, Mass., Feb. 25 -- Vertica Systems announced today that it is sponsoring the first annual Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) programming contest. Students at a degree-granting institution have until March 15, 2009, to submit a prototype for consideration as a finalist to participate in a bake-off at this year's Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) SIGMOD conference in Providence, Rhode Island. Vertica, in conjunction with a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and additional funding from Microsoft Corp., is sponsoring the contest to generate better ideas in transactional indexing systems for main memory data.

As a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners, developers and users, this year's ACM SIGMOD will be held June 29, 2009 to July 2, 2009, at the Westin Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to providing support for the development of the software to run the contest, funds from NSF, Vertica and Microsoft will be used to cover travel costs for students from each team of finalists to attend the conference and the finalist bake-off. In addition, Vertica and Microsoft have contributed funds to award the winning team a $5,000 prize.

"From daily business to advanced scientific inquiry, efficient management of data sets is increasingly important to our lives," said Samuel Madden, associate professor at MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. "We're hoping this contest will spur interest in next-generation DBMSs and produce technology innovation in transactional storage systems."

The goal of the contest is to design an index for main memory data capable of supporting exact match queries and range queries, as well as updates, inserts and deletes. The submitted system must also support serializable execution of user-specified transactions but does not need to support crash recovery. Submissions may be written in any language, but an x86 shared-library and source code that conforms to a supplied build environment is required.

"The Jim Gray Systems Lab is focused on shaping the future direction of data management," said David DeWitt, technical fellow in the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft and director of the Jim Gray Systems Lab at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. "This contest is an opportunity to bring innovative new implementations to the forefront. We hope to see some great ideas come from the entries."

Full details on the contest requirements, including the benchmark, details on data structures, the test workload and hardware platform can be found at http://db.csail.mit.edu/sigmod09contest/. A submission site to upload implementations will be provided as the final deadline approaches.

Contestants must supply the source code for their entries and agree to license their code under the BSD or MIT open source license should their system win the contest.

About Vertica

Vertica Systems is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware. Co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Vertica has developed column-oriented analytic database technology with an MPP architecture that lets companies of any size store and query very large databases orders of magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. The Vertica Analytic Database is available as software only, as an appliance or online as a cloud computing solution. The technology's unmatched speed, scalability, flexibility and ease of use helps customers like JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, Level 3 Communications and Vonage capitalize on business opportunities in real time. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, Mass. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.vertica.com/.