DSG Seminar Series • Resilient Data Management Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 2585.

Jelle Hellings, Assistant Professor
Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University

The emergence of blockchain technology is fueling the development of new blockchain-based resilient data management systems (BC-RDMSs) that can manage data between fully-independent parties (federated data management) and provide resilience to Byzantine failures (e.g., hardware failures, software failures, and malicious behavior). Due to these qualities, the usage of BC-RDMSs has been proposed in areas such as finance, health care, IoT, agriculture, and fraud-prevention.

At their core, these BC-RDMSs are distributed fully-replicated systems in which each participant maintains a copy of a ledger that stores an append-only list of all transactions requested by users and executed by the system. This ledger is constructed and stored in a tamper-proof manner: new transactions can only be appended via consensus-based agreement steps that require support of a majority of replicas, ruling out unintended changes due to a minority of faulty replicas. As the ledger is maintained by all replicas, it is stored in a highly redundant manner and will survive even if individual replicas fail.

On the one hand, current BC-RDMSs provide novel guarantees not provided by traditional database systems. On the other hand, the current consensus-based techniques used for BC-RDMSs are costly and put heavy restrictions on the operations of these systems, limiting the practical usage of BC-RDMSs. In this talk, I will provide a tour of BC-RDMSs: we will look at how they work, at their limitations, and how ongoing research aims at improving BC-RDMSs.

Bio: Jelle Hellings is currently an Assistant Professor at McMaster University. His work is centered around novel directions for high-performance data management systems. Currently, his focus is on the development of scalable resilient systems that can deal with faulty behavior (e.g., hardware failures, software failures, and malicious attacks). Furthermore, he is interested in graph databases, database theory, and algorithms, data structures, and optimization techniques to enable efficient query processing.

Previously, Jelle worked as a Postdoc Fellow at the University of California, Davis, where he focused on the theoretical aspects of resilient systems. Before, Jelle was a PhD student in the Databases and Theoretical Computer Science research group at Hasselt University, where he worked on database theory and graph query languages.

Recently, Jelle has served in the program committees of ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM DEBS, IEEE ICDCS, and IEEE DAPPS and reviewed for the conferences ACM PODS, ACM/IEEE LICS, ICDT, EATCS ICALP and several journals such as ACM TODS, VLDBJ, TCS, IEEE TDSS, and IEEE TNSM.