While there has been a proliferation of specialized vector databases, enterprise use cases for similarity search usually requires searching a combination of semantic data and business data. This talk will summarize the journey we undertook and the lessons we learned in supporting AI vector workloads in Oracle Database.

Oracle AI vector search features a new vector datatype, vector indexes, and extensions to SQL that allow seamless integration of semantic search within classical value based database queries. Oracle AI vector search also includes native APIs for the complete generative AI pipeline, for development flexibility. All of these capabilities benefit from the sophisticated scale-out, fault tolerance, and security features of Oracle Database.

We will start with a brief look at the history of Snowflake's Berlin office from its humble beginnings. Since then Snowflake Berlin has grown significantly and has its engineering teams now cover many of Snowflake's key areas. We will present some of the exciting engineering challenges that we are working on, including support for hybrid tables, supporting open source table formats, and table management. Finally we will look at our collaboration with academia, and the opportunities this affords universities and students.

Martin Schönert is Engineering Manager of the XP team at Snowflake Berlin, which owns the platform that executes the query plans - the muscles of the system. Before joining Snowflake he has been working as EM at Google (Zürich) in Apps and Assistant, and before that in different roles and companies. A long time ago he studied mathematics and developed the system GAP to investigate symmetry groups.

Alibaba Cloud offers one of the most extensive portfolios of cloud database solutions and can provide the necessary solutions to store, process, analyze and manage your data to support and add value to your business. Our database systems support all the mainstream open-source and commercial database solutions, including MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and Redis. Alibaba Cloud has been named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems for the 4th consecutive year.

Yingqiang Zhang is the Senior Staff Engineer and Director at Alibaba Cloud, leading several R&D teams within the PolarDB department and focusing on the next-generation architecture of cloud-native databases. His teams have designed and implemented critical features for PolarDB, such as strongly consistent reads on followers (presented at VLDB'23) and a serverless model for PolarDB (best industry paper at ICDE'24). Additionally, Zhang and his teams explored distributed shared-memory for cloud-native databases (presented at VLDB'21 and ASPLOS'23), and they have designed and implemented the PolarDB Multi-Primary architecture (to appear in SIGMOD'24). His research spans cloud-native database architectures, distributed systems, and hardware co-design. He has published papers in several top conferences such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, and ASPLOS. He also serves for ICDE 2024 and ChinaSys Workshop 2024 as a PC member.

Dr Jianjun Chen is Director of Infrastructure System Lab at ByteDance US, where he leads a team of top-notch researchers and software engineers to work on cutting edge technologies in the infrastructure system related areas, including but not limited to database, storage, computing, networking, ML, hardware/software codesign etc. Before that, he was a technical VP of Huawei US Silicon Valley R&D Center, leading advanced database research and development in the Huawei database group. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D in 2001 from the Computer Sciences department of University of Wisconsin, Madison and is a recipient of the SIGMOD 10 year Test-Time award in 2010 for his visionary work in scalable continuous query processing, as part of his Ph.D dissertation research.

Nikos Ntarmos is the Director of the Database Lab at Huawei's Edinburgh Research Centre, where he leads a team of researchers and engineers working on designing and implementing next generation database management systems, for environments ranging from small routers/switches to big-iron servers and the cloud. His research interests lie in the areas of distributed computing and (large-scale) data management systems, with a focus on issues pertaining to storage, indexing and query processing and optimization, in embedded databases, distributed data stores, multi-model databases, geo-distributed data management infrastructures, and joint at-rest/streaming data processing systems. He received his PhD in computer engineering and informatics from the University of Patras in 2008. He is a member of the IEEE and the ACM, and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. Before joining Huawei, he held academic posts at the University of Glasgow and the University of Ioannina, and research fellow posts at the University of Glasgow and the University of Patras. He has also worked as a research engineer, software engineer, and senior systems administrator, and routinely contributes to open-source projects. He has supervised or co-supervised 7 PhD and over 50 MSc students, was a recipient of the best paper award at the ACM CIKM 2006 conference and the best student paper award at the IEEE Big Data 2018 conference, and has served in the Program Committees of multiple international conferences (including ACM SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware, WISE, IEEE CCNC, etc.).

OceanBase is a distributed SQL database built from scratch from 2010 by Ant Group. Initially, it was used by all mission critical systems in Alipay and then extended to more than 1000 external customers outside Alipay. It started as a distributed OLTP database, but more and more customers used it in mixed workload scenarios such as OLAP and NOSQL. This talk will mainly focus on the technical challenges from distributed OLTP to HTAP, such as column storage, resource isolation, complex queries, multi-model in distributed SQL database.

Chuanhui Yang, also known by his nickname "Rizhao," serves as the Chief Technology Officer for OceanBase, a native distributed database developed by Ant Group. His areas of expertise include large-scale cloud computing systems and distributed databases. In 2010, he joined OceanBase as one of its founding members. He has played a pivotal role in every phase of OceanBase's architecture design and technology development, leading to its successful implementation across Ant Group. Additionally, Yang led the team that twice broke world records in the TPC-C benchmarks. He is the author of "Large-scale Distributed Storage Systems: Theory Analysis and Practical Framework" and contributed to "Analysis of OceanBase Database Source Code." Currently, Yang Chuanhui and his team at OceanBase are dedicated to creating a next-generation enterprise-level distributed database that is more open, flexible, efficient, and user-friendly.

Yuxing Chen received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Helsinki, Finland, 2021, He currently works as a senior research engineer in the database R&D department at Tencent, China. His research interests focus on database performance and evaluation, transaction processing, and database storage. He has published papers in several prestigious conferences and journals such as SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, and TKDE.