Khuzaima Daudjee

Professor

Khuzaima Daudjee
Research interests

Dr. Daudjee's research interests are in database systems, distributed systems and software engineering. He is particularly interested in problems that lie at the intersection of databases and distributed systems.

Recent research has focussed on how to support query processing in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. While popular data is likely to be easily located in a P2P system, queries that need to access ranges of data that include unpopular data may suffer from poor performance. This project investigates how to increase the availability of these less popular data so that overall query processing performance is improved.

Another research project investigated how database systems can be scaled-up to improve system performance. While data replication and data partitioning can be used to build scalable systems, both techniques introduce consistency and co-ordination issues that need to be addressed. For example, when replication is used, if updates are not applied in the same order to all replicas, the data can become inconsistent. The challenge is to build systems that scale, perform well and guarantee consistent data.

Dr. Daudjee has also worked on various software engineering problems. Examples of these are how to effectively reuse software components and how to capture and incorporate requirements early into the software lifecycle so as to reduce the cost of software development.

Degrees and awards

BSc (Trent), MSc (York), PhD (Waterloo)

Industrial and sabbatical experience

Dr. Daudjee has worked for Nortel Networks as a software engineer on the design and development of performance monitoring systems for telecommunications applications, and as a database systems engineer in a start-up venture. In the latter, he was involved in improving the query processor of a database engine and in optimizing the retrieval of data from storage. He has also worked on database support for the rapid development of web applications.

Representative publications

P. Kling, M. T. Özsu,and K. Daudjee. Generating efficient execution plans for vertically partitioned XML databases. Proc. VLDB, 4(1) to appear

Q. Wang, K. Daudjee, and M. T. Ozsu. Popularity-aware Prefetch in P2P Range Caching. Proceedings of the 8th IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing (P2P'08), pp. 53-62, 2008.

K. Daudjee and K. Salem. Lazy Database Replication with Snapshot Isolation. Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), pp. 715-726, 2006.

K. Daudjee and K. Salem. Lazy Database Replication with Ordering Guarantees. Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pp. 424-435, 2004.

D. M. Berry, K. Daudjee, J. Dong, I. Fainchtein, M. Nelson, T. Nelson, and L. Ou. User's Manual as a Requirements Specification: Case Studies. Requirements Engineering Journal, 9(1):67-82, 2004.