Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 3301.
Boris Glavic, Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago
A long line of work in data provenance has investigated how to add support for provenance capture to relational databases. However, achieving high performance for complex queries has been challenging. Systems that have low overhead modify the execution engine of database systems while systems that are “bolt-on” have high overhead. In this work, we demonstrated that, with the right combination of algorithmic and systems techniques, it is possible to achieve competitive performance relying exclusively on extensibility mechanisms supported by most databases.
Our approach is based on a lightweight parallelism-friendly logging framework using memory-mapped files and a two-phase capture strategy that opportunistically combines logging with propagation. We implemented our ideas in a system called TraceProv on top of PostgreSQL and DuckDB. TraceProv supports complex SQL queries, utilizes intra-query parallelism supported by the database system, and can handle larger-than-memory data. We experimentally demonstrated that TraceProv outperforms all SOTA relational provenance systems.
Bio: Boris Glavic received his Diploma (Master) in Computer Science from the RWTH Aachen in Germany, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, being advised by Michael Böhlen and Gustavo Alonso. Afterwards, he spent two years as a Postdoc in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto working at the Database Research Group under Renée J. Miller. Before joining UIC in 2024, he was a Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago from 2012 to 2023.