On July 5, the further appointment ceremony of Professor Chandrasekaran Mohan, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Tsinghua University, and the 19th issue of Tsinghua Software Forum were held simultaneously in Conference Room 10-316 of the East Main Building of Tsinghua University and online. Professor Mohan gave an academic report entitled "Complex and Simple Choices in Software Design". Academician Sun Jiaguang, Dean Wang Jianmin, faculty representatives Liu Lin, Song Shaoxu, Wen Lijie, Long Mingsheng, Qiao Jialing, Wang Yankai and more than 400 researchers and practitioners in the field of software and database from both inside and outside Tsinghua University attended the conference through a combination of online and offline. The meeting was chaired by Wang Jianmin.
Academician Sun Jiaguang presented the letter of appointment letter to Professor Mohan
Professor C. Mohan gave the talk
Professor Mohan begins with an analysis of the real-world challenges of pursuing minimalism in software design and, using design and evolution scenarios from his 40-year career in database systems research, analyzes the many factors to be considered in system design decisions. First, a successful system design must balance multiple competing top-level goals: performance, availability, scalability, and design requirements for heterogeneous hardware and software platform environments and workloads. Secondly, the pursuit of simplicity is different from person to person, taking database system design as an example, it needs to be clear whether the evaluation of design simplicity stands in the perspective of database management system designers, database administrators, application developers, or operations personnel. Professor Mohan details the key design decisions of database systems in different eras, especially when the system is faced with new evolutionary requirements. Software system design is always in the process of continuous evolution from simple to complex, through the collision with the real needs to mature.
In the question session, the teachers and students asked questions about the boundary definition of database system, vector database, and the latest progress of the combination of database and artificial intelligence, and Professor Mohan answered them one by one. The teachers and students attending the meeting said that they got rich inspiration from Professor Mohan's report, which caused everyone to think about a lot of new thoughts on database system software development.
On-site of the report
【BIOS of Chandrasekaran Mohan】
Professor Chandrasekaran Mohan is a member of the American National Academy of Engineering, a foreign member of the Indian National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Tsinghua University, Distinguished Professor of Science of Hong Kong Baptist University, IBM Fellow, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow. He retired from IBM Almaden Research Center in June 2020 as one of the pioneers of contemporary database and data management technology, his research has influenced several database products, and was the first IBM employee and non-American to receive the ACM SIGMOD Innovation Award. He is the fifth winner after Mike Stonebraker (1992), Jim Gray (1993), Phil Bernstein (1994) and David DeWitt (1995). He is also one of the winners of the VLDB10 Best Paper Award.
