Page type: faculty

Home Page of David J. DeWitt;;David J. DeWitt; Professor and Romnes Fellow; Computer Sciences Department; University of Wisconsin; 1210 W. Dayton St.; Madison, WI 53706-1685; Telephone: (608) 262-1204; Fax: (608) 262-9777; Email: dewitt@cs.wisc.edu;Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1976;Interests:;Object oriented database systems, parallel database systems, database;benchmarking, geographic information systems; Research Summary;My two main research projects are SHORE and Paradise. The objective;of SHORE is to design, implement, and evaluate a persistent object;system that will serve the needs of a wide variety of target applications;including hardware and software CAD systems, persistent programming;languages, geographic information systems, satellite data repositories,;and multimedia applications. SHORE expands on the basic capabilities;of the widely-used Exodus Storage Manager (developed at Wisconsin,;funded by ARPA) in a number of ways including support for typed;objects, multiple programming languages, a `Unix-like' hierarchical;name space for named objects, and a Unix-compatible interface;to objects with a `text' field. This interface is intended to;ease the transition of applications from the Unix file system;environment to SHORE as existing Unix tools such as vi and cc;will be able to store their data in SHORE objects without modification;(basically a Unix file becomes either a single SHORE object or;the text field of a complex object). SHORE is being targeted at;a wide range of hardware environments, scaling all the way from;individual workstations to heterogeneous client/server networks;to large multiprocessors such as the Intel Paragon. SHORE is a;joint project with Profs. Carey, Naughton, and Solomon.;The Paradise project is attempting to apply the technology developed;as part of the SHORE and Gamma projects (Gamma is a parallel relational;database system developed at the University of Wisconsin) to the;task of storing and manipulating geographic data sets. Currently,;many geographic information systems (GIS) use relational database;systems to hold their data. While such systems are excellent for;managing business data they are a poor match for the modeling;needs of a GIS which must be capable of storing and manipulating;much more complex objects such as polygons and polylines. Instead,;Paradise employs an object-oriented data model, providing a much;better match to the type needs of a GIS. Another significant difference;from current GIS systems is that Paradise employs parallelism;to facilitate executing and processing large data sets such as;satellite images. The target hardware platform for the project;is a cluster of 64 Sparc 20s connected with ATM.; Sample Recent Publications; The OO7 benchmark (with;M. Carey and J. Naughton), Proceedings of the SIGMOD Conference,;Washington, DC, May, 1993.; Shoring up persistent;applications (with D. DeWitt, M. Franklin, N. Hall, M. McAuliffe,;J. Naughton, D. S chuh, C. Tan, O. Tsatalos, S. White, and M.;Zwilling), Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD International Conference;on Management of Data, Minneapolis, MN, May, 1994.; Client-server Paradise;(with N. Kabra, J. Luo, J. Patel, and J. Yu), Proceedings;of the Very Large Data Base Conference, Santiego, Chile,;August, 1994.; Recent Talks; VLDB 95 Invited Talk; 1996 Object-Relational Summit Presentation; This page was automatically created January 18, 1995.; Email pubs@cs.wisc.edu to report errors.;