A large international database conference arrives in Helsinki in May

The city of Helsinki will witness a major event during May 16-20, 2016 when one of the largest database technology conferences will take place. The IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering, briefly ICDE, is organized yearly in different cities of the world. In its 32nd year, hosted by Aalto University, it will come to Helsinki first time in its history. The conference is organized by IEEE that is the world's largest engineers' association, and also encompasses a large portion of the research community.

Databases are in the core of many current advances of information technology. While databases have been known in enterprise computing and information retrieval, they concur new lands. Contrary to what can be thought, databases do not only represent legacy technology but face totally new challenges in new fields like telecommunication, new ways of internet-based computing like Internet of Things, cloud computing, and mobile computing.

Data management challenges of telecom services

The next big wave in the mobile telecom industry is expected with the outbreak of Internet of Things. It is predicted that the number of connected devices will grow from billions to tens of billions and the implementation of telecom systems is shifting away from dedicated hardware to virtualized components.

- The main driver for the cloudification is the operators’ desire to be more flexible and to be able to reduce the capital expenses. For customers, the cloudification will bring highly personalized, resilient services that the subscribers may provision themselves, explains Dr. Götz Brasche, CTO IT R&D Europe and Director of the Central Software Institute at the European Research Center of Huawei, one of the keynote speakers.

Network components will be implemented as layers of distributed virtualized services. Distributed databases enter a new era of having to deliver demanding service quality in non-demanding environment. Also, present are new trends of memory-centered systems, and utilizing new technologies like non-volatile memory and transactional memory.

- Moving of software to clouds is not trivial. To fully utilize the clouds, the software will have to be redesigned. Especially, with databases, this is challenging because the level of software distribution will increase and new ways to deal with new types of failures will have to be developed, Brasche continues.

- There is a concept of service continuity in telecom, meaning the capability to mask most of the failures in a way that the failures are left unnoticed by the subscriber. Because databases are running behind all advanced mobile services, the availability of databases is very crucial. Conferences like ICDE help database researchers and experts from all over the world to combine forces to meet all these new requirements, Brasche concludes.

The ICDE conference is a perfect vista point for anybody in the IT field who uses or develops databases. The conference program is published and the registration is open at http://icde2016.fi/.

More information:

Eljas Soisalon-Soininen

Professor of Computer Science

Aalto University School of Science

[email protected]

Conference website: http://icde2016.fi/