My name is Ippokratis Pandis and I like to build systems. My work focuses on efficient, scalable business intelligence and transaction processing in modern hardware.

Currently, I am an engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and I am working on AWS Redshift. Amazon Redshift is Amazon's fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse. At AWS, I spent a lot of time working on Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Federated Query, Concurrency Scaling, DataSharing and Amazon Redshift Serverless features of Amazon Redshift.

Before AWS, I was a software engineer working on the Impala project at Cloudera. Impala is an open source, MPP SQL query processing engine that runs natively in Apache Hadoop.

Before Cloudera, I was a member of the Research Staff (RSM) at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. At IBM I was actively involved in the BLU project. My IBM webpage can be found here.

DB2 BLU is the column-store (in) DB2. It was first released as part of IBM DB2 LUW v10.5 with BLU Acceleration. BLU deeply integrates innovative techniques for processing column-organized tables that speed read-mostly queries by 10 to 100 times and improve storage savings by 3 to 10 times, compared to traditional row-organized tables, without the complexity of defining indexes or materialized views. A thorough technical description of DB2 BLU can be found here.

Prior joining IBM, I was a Ph.D. candidate of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. My advisor was Prof. Anastassia Ailamaki. During my PhD I worked on the StagedDB/CMP project. This project studied the behavior of modern DBMSs on the emerging multi-core (CMP) and multi-processor (SMP) environments, and tried to enhance their performance by proposing new designs both in the software, and hardware level. For more details: Staged Database Systems
As part of our research, our team has implemented Shore-MT. Shore-MT is a scalable multi-threaded port of the Shore storage manager. It can be downloaded from here.

My PhD thesis focused on the scalability of transaction processing systems and introduces a data-oriented transaction execution architecture (or DORA). A presentation about data-oriented transaction execution and Shore-MT can be found here.

I am co-organizing the Tenth International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware, or DaMoN 2014. DaMoN is a one day workshop co-located with SIGMOD. SIGMOD 2014 will be held in Snowbird, UT.

I am the PC area chair for the Main-memory, Parallel and Distributed Database systems area of the DB Track of ACM CIKM 2014. CIKM 2014 will be held in Shanghai, China.

My resume: CV (.pdf ). Twitter: @Hippotas. Also: Publications, Google Scholar profile, and DBLP Entry

Latest News
24/May/2014
Our paper on joins on encoded and partitioned data was accepted for publication at the industrial track of VLDB 2014, which will be held in Hangzhou, China in September.
28/Apr/2014
I decided to join the Impala team at Cloudera as a software engineer.
21/Feb/2013
Our paper on eliminating unscalable communication in OLTP has been accepted for publication at the VLDB Journal.
10/Jan/2013
Our paper on Bionic DBMSs was voted as one of the three Best Papers of the Outrageous Ideas and Vision track of CIDR 2013! The presentation (with a typo correction) can be found here.
21/Dec/2012
Our paper "From A to E: Analyzing TPC's OLTP Benchmarks" has been accepted for publication on EDBT 2013.
12/Oct/2012
Our paper "The bionic DBMS is coming, but what it will look like" has been accepted for publication on the Outrageous Ideas and Vision track of CIDR 2013.
12/Oct/2012
Our paper "NUMA-aware algorithms: the case of data shuffling" that discusses how to shuffle data in large SMP multicores has been accepted for publication at CIDR 2013.
3/May/2012
Our paper "OLTP on Hardware Islands" has been accepted for publication at PVLDB 2012. It will presented in VLDB 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.
5/Mar/2012
Uploaded some of the presentation we did over the recent years. They are in the Publications page.
22/Aug/2011
I joined IBM Almaden Research Center as member of the research staff. I am member of the Advanced Database Solutions (K55G) group, managed by Dr. Guy Lohman. I am simply excited to join this team!
14/July/2011
The camera-ready version of our PLP paper on page latch-free shared-everything OLTP, which will be presented at VLDB 2011, can be downloaded from here.
16/June/2011
Our demonstration of a data-oriented transaction processing system won the Best Demonstration Award at SIGMOD 2011! Implementing and presenting this DORA demo has been such a great experience. The poster we used during the demonstration can be downloaded from here.
19/May/2011
Our paper "PLP: Page Latch-free Shared-everything OLTP" has been accepted for presentation in VLDB 2011 in Seattle, WA.
12/May/2011
I have successfully defended my PhD Thesis!
9/Feb/2011
I am member of the Program Committee for DBTest 2011 which will be held in conjunction with the SIGMOD conference.
9/Feb/2011
Our study which analyzes and compares the I/O traces from one of the commercial database servers when running the TPC-E and TPC-C database benchmarks, will appear in SIGMOD Record.
12/Jul/2010
The camera-ready version of our PVLDB 2010 "Data-Oriented Transaction execution" (or DORA) paper has just been uploaded here.
12/Jul/2010
The camera-ready version of our VLDB 2010 "Aether: A scalable approach to logging" paper has just been uploaded here.
12/Jun/2010
Our paper "Aether: A scalable approach to logging" has been accepted for presentation in VLDB 2010 in Singapore.
29/Oct/2009
Just came back from the 13th International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS 2009). It was an exciting workshop. I gave a talk on DORA. My presentation can be found here.
30/Sept/2009
Our paper "Data-Oriented Transaction Execution" was accepted for publication in PVLDB Vol. 3, and it is going to be presented at the VLDB 2010 conference in Singapore.
23/May/2009
Our team released Shore-MT. Shore-MT is a scalable multi-threaded port of the Shore storage manager. It can be downloaded from here.
20/Feb/2009
The camera ready version of our EDBT 2009 paper has been uploaded here.
16/May/2008
The camera ready version of our DaMoN 2008 paper has been uploaded here.
7/July/2007
The camera ready version of our VLDB 2007 paper has been uploaded here.
12/June/2007
This summer, I will be a summer intern at Microsoft Research at Redmond, WA. I will be member of the Database Research group, mentored by Dr. Jingren Zhou.
3/May/2007
The list of accepted papers for DaMoN 2007 has been uploaded here.
1/Mar/2007
The website for DaMoN 2007 is on-line.
15/Jan/2007
In Spring 2007 I will be TAing the course ECE 18-842: Distributed Systems, taught by Prof. Greg Ganger.
17/Nov/2006
For another year Carnegie Mellon University is ranked among the top Engineering and Computer Science Schools. In particular, according to U.S. News the Computer Science Ph.D. program is ranked 1st and the Computer Engineering Graduate program is 3rd.
17/Nov/2006
The Qualifying exams of the ECE department is a great challenge. I am really glad that I am done with them.
26/Aug/2006
In Fall 2006 I will be TAing the course CS 15-415: Database Applications, taught by Prof. Christos Faloutsos.
6/Apr/2006
Our QPipe Demo at the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE2006), in Atlanta, GA, won the Best Demo Award!! The poster of the demo can be found here. While some photos from the conference can be found here.
23/Mar/2006
I was invited to participate in the Review Committee of the Seventeenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, which will be held in Odense, Denmark - 23-25 August 2006 (HYPERTEXT 2006).
31/Jan/2006
I uploaded a number of photos. Check my personal page (here).
31/Jan/2006
I was appointed Web Chair for the Second International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware (DaMoN 2006).
16/Jan/2006
The new semester has started (Spring 2006). During this semester I am attending only one class, instructed by Professor Falsafi: 18-742 Multiprocessor Architecture.
20/Oct/2005
I returned from the CMU's Parallel Data Lab (PDL) Retreat. The Retreat took place in a resort 1 hour outside of Pittsburgh called Nemacolin Woodlands Resort. The whole experience was very good.
9/Sept/2005
Finally, I have settled down in Pittsburgh. You can see my updated contact information in the Contact page.
11/July/2005
My personal Web site has been updated and moved to Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science (SCS) web space. Its address is: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ipandis/