BIFOLD Colloquium 08/2024

Perspective from a decade of building Databricks

What's new since SIGMOD 1985?

Abstract:

In 2012, a year before the founding of Databricks, Reynold stumbled upon a book of SIGMOD’85 proceedings in the AMPLab office. He felt disheartened, as many of those papers could have been republished in 2012 by simply replacing “megabytes” with “terabytes”. Every topic, perhaps with the exception of columnar databases, had already been studied.
 
In this talk, Reynold will share how his perspective has changed over the course of more than a decade, from a depressed PhD student to co-founding and building one of today’s leading data systems companies. He will discuss his learnings from working with customers and building systems to support exabyte workloads across millions of virtual machines.

The lecture will also be offered in a hybrid format. If you are interested in participating digitally, please contact: pr@bifold.berlin

Short-bio

Reynold Xin is a Co-founder and Chief Architect at Databricks, where he leads the development of core data systems including Apache Spark, Delta Lake, Photon, and Databricks SQL. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in large scale data systems.