Comment by sghiassy
6 hours ago
Clickhouse Labs is a research lab for ClickHouse’s engineers and their db product?
Whatever floats your boat. Sounds like you just work as an engineer at a db company
6 hours ago
Clickhouse Labs is a research lab for ClickHouse’s engineers and their db product?
Whatever floats your boat. Sounds like you just work as an engineer at a db company
Deep tech fields have a more complex relationship with academia than other industries. Engineers often need license to test ideas that may not see adoption for years, or require tens of millions to build-out.
A "research" arm is exactly this license, although it comes at the cost of potentially killing innovation in the rest of the company.
C'mon, databases are great but they are not in any way a "deep tech" field. Databases exist today in a zillion production forms as commercial products and free software.
Deep tech includes things like nuclear fusion, solid state batteries, quantum computers. I know everyone wants to feel cool, but just because your new javascript framework will be in beta for the next ten years doesn't make it "deep tech".
The databases we use today in production have severe limitations and are not even close to what is theoretically possible. Many traditional parts of a database (indexing, caching, scheduling, et al) are AI-complete algorithm problems. Entire sub-classes of database (e.g. graph or spatial) famously have persistently poor scalability and performance because of open questions in the foundational computer science.
Just the fact that increasing the generality, scalability, and performance of databases asymptotically converges on designing AGI suggests that it is, in fact, "deep tech". And this property has to mesh with other practical constraints on database behavior. Many problems in databases are hard with little forward progress in decades.
It is true that most database research is not deep tech but there is ample room for it to be if one is sufficiently ambitious.
6 replies →
Maybe only an OS can be close to how MUCH deep you can go with a DB engine.
And I bet DB engines can go far than normal OS.
You don't know how much is still waiting for somebody to try, and how much is not applied. And how many of that DBs are not even doing, because all are constrained be being "apps" with so poor interface (sql).
Fun fact: Not exist a viable true relational DBs implemented, neither exist one with a viable programming language AND apis that is for developers.
ZERO.
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I'd ascribe "deep tech" to anything that you can reasonably get a PhD in and have it not be unusual. There are dozens of academic conferences on DBs pushing the frontier forward.
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I'm not sure what you think "research lab" means? As I mentioned in the article, we look at IBM Research (Almaden) and Microsoft Research as inspiration.
Looking forward to the database analogues of IBM Watson and Tay.ai
I'm partly kidding; there's plenty of space for innovation in databases. You should sponsor https://sled.rs/
A cobbler should stick to his last.
Many database companies have research labs. It allows you to explore ideas, unorthodox concepts, and parts of the design space that may never be reflected in an actual product. Or to figure out how to solve specific hard problems that you come across with neither a good solution nor proof of impossibility in literature.
This is essential for a company that wants to stay on the frontier of database tech.
Which database companies have research labs? AFAIK amazon, snowflake, databricks, google and SAP don’t have a research lab dedicated to databases. They have some people that are paid to do research but there does not seem to be an IBM Almaden anywhere in the world.
There is MongoDB Labs FWIW (also Oracle Labs but I think that's just rebranded Sun Labs and not sure how much DB research happens there).