Like most fields, the database field has gone through various eras - a.k.a. pendulum swings - and we are currently in the era of "One Size Fits All: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone".  This is great news for industry sectors such as the Bubble Gum industry and the international consortium of Baling Wire manufacturers, and it is also very good news for Information Integration enthusiasts.  Why?  Because the current state of practice related to "Big Data" involves somehow piecing together many systems whose target sizes fit different use cases.  This talk will provide a brief history of Big Data platforms followed by an overview of the ASTERIX project at UC Irvine.  ASTERIX is a new, coherent, scalable, open-source Big Data Management System (BDMS) and underlying software stack that we hope will solve a range of problems that today require too many piece parts to solve.

Michael J. Carey is currently a Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine.  Immediately prior to joining UCI in 2008, Carey worked at BEA Systems for seven years and served as the chief architect of (and an engineering director for) BEA's AquaLogic Data Services Platform product.  Carey also spent twelve years as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, five years at IBM Almaden as a database researcher/manager, and a year and a half as a Fellow (and briefly VP of Software) at e-commerce software startup Propel Software during the 2000-2001 Internet bubble.  Carey is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD E. F. Codd Innovations Award.  His current research interests are centered around data-intensive computing and scalable data management (a.k.a. Big Data).