Last Friday, I attended the inaugural lecture of Professor Peter Boncz at the VU University Amsterdam. As the reader is likely to know, Peter is one of the database luminaries of the 21st century, known among other things for architecting MonetDB and Actian Vector (Vectorwise) and publishing a stellar succession of core database papers.
The lecture touched on the fact of the data economy and the possibilities of E-science. Peter proceeded to address issues of ethics of cyberspace and the fact of legal and regulatory practice trailing far behind the factual dynamics of cyberspace. In conclusion, Peter gave some pointers to his research agenda; for example, use of just-in-time compilation for fusing problem-specific logic with infrastructure software like databases for both performance and architecture adaptivity.
There was later a party in Amsterdam with many of the local database people as well as some from further away, e.g., Thomas Neumann of Munich, and Marcin Zukowsky, Vectorwise founder and initial CEO.
I should have had the presence of mind to prepare a speech for Peter. Stefan Manegold of CWI did give a short address at the party, while presenting the gifts from Peter's CWI colleagues. To this I will add my belated part here, as follows:
If I were to describe Prof. Boncz, our friend, co-worker, and mentor, in one word, this would be man of knowledge. If physicists define energy as that which can do work, then knowledge would be that which can do meaningful work. A schematic in itself does nothing. Knowledge is needed to bring this to life. Yet this is more than an outstanding specialist skill, as this implies discerning the right means in the right context and includes the will and ability to go through with this. As Peter now takes on the mantle of professor, the best students will, I am sure, not fail to recognize excellence and be accordingly inspired to strive for the sort of industry changing accomplishments we have come to associate with Peter's career so far. This is what our world needs. A big cheer for Prof. Boncz!
I did talk to many at the party, especially Pham Minh Duc, who is doing schema-aware RDF in MonetDB, and many others among the excellent team at CWI. Stefan Manegold told me about Rethink Big, an FP7 for big data policy recommendations. I was meant to be an advisor and still hope to go to one of their meetings for some networking about policy. On the other hand, the EU agenda and priorities, as discussed with, for example, Stefano Bertolo, are, as far as I am concerned, on the right track: The science of performance must meet with the real, or at least realistic, data. Peter did not fail to mention this same truth in his lecture: Spinoffs play a key part in research, and exposure to the world out there gives research both focus and credibility. As René Char put it in his poem L'Allumette (The Matchstick), "La tête seule à pouvoir de prendre feu au contact d'une réalité dure." ("The head alone has power to catch fire at the touch of hard reality.") Great deeds need great challenges, and there is nothing like reality to exceed man's imagination.
For my part, I was advertising the imminent advances in the Virtuoso RDF and graph functionality. Now that the SQL part, which is anyway the necessary foundation for all this, is really very competent, it is time to deploy these same things in slightly new ways. This will produce graph analytics and structure-aware RDF to match relational performance while keeping schema-last-ness. Anyway, the claim has been made; we will see how it is delivered during the final phase of LDBC and Geoknow.