Overview

Computers are used less for computing per se than for the
management, distribution and analysis of information. Database
research thus goes to the heart of computing. Berkeley's
database group defined the field in the 1970's, via pioneering
research projects including INGRES and POSTGRES that spawned
a multi-billion dollar relational database industry and a series of
influential open source systems. Today, the group continues to
redefine the field, taking the foundations of data management
into a global environment of live, noisy, networked data sources.

Database group web site: db.cs.berkeley.edu

Topics
• Declarative Networking
Database systems have long used "declarative" languages,
in which programmers focus on program outcomes (what)
rather than implementation (how.) In recent years, our
group has demonstrated that recursive declarative
languages and runtime engines are an excellent match for
building distributed and networked systems. Our declarative
networking approach provides radically simplified, efficient
implementations of tasks as diverse as distributed query
processing, statistical inference, distributed agreement, and
core networking protocols. We have demonstrated that
declarative programs a few dozen lines long compete with
C++ implementations that are tens of thousands of lines
long. Our software includes the P2 system for declarative
overlay networks on the Internet, and the DSN system for
declarative programming of wireless sensor networks.

• Data Management for Wireless Sensor Networks and RFID

Berkeley is the multidisciplinary leader in wireless sensor
network research. Sensor networks, and related
technologies like RFID infrastructures, are by their nature
tools for data acquisition and management, and Berkeley's
database group has played a key role in this space. We
developed the TinyDB sensornet query engine, the first
system to provide a high-level language and runtime for
tasking entire"clouds" of sensors in a simple way. We
designed probabilistic methods for energy-efficient
 approximation of sensornet queries and distributed triggers,
as well as statistical methods to clean noisy data coming
from unpredictable RFID readers. The Declarative Sensor
Network (DSN) project described above investigates the use
of deductive database techniques to programming entire
sensornet "stacks", from core networking internals to high-
level data management.

• Probabilistic Data Management

Several real-world applications need to effectively manage
large amounts of data that are inherently uncertain,
employing sophisticated probabilistic modeling tools to
accurately reason about complex correlation/causality
patterns in the data. Example applications include sensor-
rich, "smart-home" environments and bioinformatics
databases, where noisy, uncertain data is the norm and
probabilistic models are used, e.g., to infer user activities or
reason about protein molecule structures. We are working
to redefine the algorithms and architecture of a DBMS to
effectively manage uncertainty and probabilistic reasoning
as "first-class citizens" of the system. This includes novel
techniques for (a) exposing statistical modeling structures
and inference algorithms to key DBMS components (e.g.,
query engine, query optimizer), and (b) supporting a
uniform, declarative means for higher-level applications to
store, query, and learn from such probabilistic data.

• Stream Query Processing

Traditional data management has assumed a stored
repository of information. Recent years have seen a
proliferation of streaming data sources, including sensor
networks, financial data feeds, and monitors of networks
and software services. Stream data management raises a
number of new challenges in adaptively processing multiple
queries, managing fault tolerance, dealing with archives,
and providing approximate answers in overload situations.
Berkeley's database group has been a leader in this area,
investigating these issues and more in the context of the
Telegraph project for adaptive processing of stream queries,
and in the YFilter XML message broker.