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Overview
My research centres around the making of database systems in the context of modern hardware, new programming language features, and new applications. The goal of my work is to build systems that both run fast and are easy to implement. My work also extends to related areas such as operating systems, parallel programming and distributed systems.
Most work in my lab is open-source and some has been adopted by real products, such as Amazon Redshift which uses the Serial Safety Net, and DragonflyDB which adopts Dash. My lab is part of the Data Science Research Group and Systems Group at SFU.
I will be moving to the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in January 2027. If you are a prospective students interested in working with me, please apply to Waterloo's CS PhD program.
Recent Work and Activities
- Latency/scheduling optimizations in database systems: PreemptDB [SIGMOD '25], MosaicDB [VLDB '24], CoroBase [VLDB '21]
- DBMS and systems programming primitives: DMS [CIDR '26], FARLock [OSDI '26], Tabular [VLDB '25], OptiQL [SIGMOD '24]
- Indexing on disaggregated memory: DEX [VLDB '24]
- Systems aspects of online schema evolution: Tesseract [VLDB '23]
Awards and Honours
- ACM SIGMOD Best Paper Award, 2025 (PreemptDB)
- Distinguished Reviewer, VLDB 2024, VLDB 2023, SIGMOD 2022, SIGMOD 2021
- ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, 2023 (Skeena), 2021 (Dash)
- ACM TODS "Bests of SIGMOD" Invitation, 2022
- IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing (Early Career Researchers), 2019
Links
- Checkout Ktau! A company by colleagues working on generative engine optimization (GEO).
- Gradschool application advice
- godbolt.org
- LaTeX tables generator