Schedule - PGConf NYC 2023
Curt Kolovson
I was a member of the original Postgres research project at UC Berkeley from 1986-1990 when I was a PhD student. My PhD advisor was Prof. Michael Stonebraker. Although I played a minor role in the Postgres project, my claim to fame is that I implemented the first version of the Postgres Vacuum Daemon. At that time, one key feature of Postgres was to be a no-overwrite data store that contained past states of tuples (historical data), in order to support "time travel". The idea was that historical data would be maintained in Postgres up to some user-specified time in the past, and data older than that would be periodically "vacuumed" to write-once read-many ("WORM") optical drives, which were new at the time. As everyone knows, the historical data feature of Postgres was eventually dropped, and vacuuming took on a different purpose in order to reduce data bloat resulting from how MVCC was implemented. My PhD thesis topic was "Indexing Techniques for Multidimensional Spatial Data and Historical Data in Database Management Systems", and I had two papers published during my PhD years. They were [Curtis P. Kolovson, Michael Stonebraker: Segment Indexes: Dynamic Indexing Techniques for Multi-Dimensional Interval Data. SIGMOD Conference 1991: 138-147], and [Curtis P. Kolovson, Michael Stonebraker: Indexing Techniques for Historical Databases. ICDE 1989: 127-137]. Before doing my PhD, I worked at Bell Labs and Hewlett-Packard (HP). Since completing my PhD, I have worked in industry for HP, VMware, and now at MariaDB. My focus has always been on Database Management Systems. To quote Prof. Andy Pavlo, "I f---ing love databases."