Hi, I have been a professional Perl programmer for 4 years now. I have
found that I like accessing and manipulating databases from Perl more
than anything else that I have done.

I do like teaching also, but after a few bouts with middle and high
school, my mom has convinced me that I should probably teach at
university level instead of high-school level.

What schools are doing the most exciting research in databases these
days? I looked at Joe Celko's email address and browsed Northface.edu as
a result... now THAT is a fascinating program. Almost everywhere I have
worked the databases were poorly designed and administered. Part of that
is due to having undertrained and underpaid people do the work as
opposed to finding a top-tier consulting agency... but having worked
with top and 2nd-tiers orgs let me tell you, things are not always much
better there either.

The only thing about Northface.edu is that it looks like post-graduation
would involve a lot of travelling around and I hope to settle down
somewhere and not move. And also the program looks like it is geared
towards creating industry professionals and not teachers... but perhaps
one could end up doing some of both.

Stanford is the epicenter.

"Terrence Brannon" <metaperl (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote

In the last exciting episode, Terrence Brannon <metaperl (AT) sbcglobal (DOT) net> wrote:
Take a look at the last few years worth of ACM TODS (Transactions on
Database Systems); this area is looking pretty blighted as far as
research is concerned.

The stuff that is publishable tends to be proofs based on Prolog-like
views of databases. And while that's legitimate enough, in some ways,
that's obviously VASTLY different from commercial usage.

In effect, the major research on "how to do relational stuff" was done
15 years ago, and there's nothing too terribly novel left to be done
there. (That this hasn't all been applied in commercial systems is
beside the point; THAT won't be accomplished by doing additional
academic research papers...)

The _big_ database research centre used to be "Whereever Michael
Stonebraker is teaching," and his departure to industry has pretty
much ended that.

The total irrelevancy of TODS to commercial DBMS work (and it is NOT
merely that there's a 10 year lag time for research to be applied)
points to how blighted the research area is.

For a while, you could readily get funding for research if you had a
project with "XML" in the proposal; I suspect that has died down a
bit.

The only area that is arguably MORE blighted than DBMS research would
be operating system research, where it is NEARLY fair to say that the
only OSes that matter anymore are Windows NT and Linux. (Should that
be true? Surely not. But realistically, it is so...)
--
let name="aa454" and tld="freenet.carleton.ca" in name ^ "@" ^ tld;;
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/linux.html
Rules of the Evil Overlord #69. "All midwives will be banned from the
realm. All babies will be delivered at state-approved
hospitals. Orphans will be placed in foster-homes, not abandoned in
the woods to be raised by creatures of the wild."
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>

I like it But we are working on getting an undergrad program in
place first, then going to an executive MBA program. We are a
start-up university.


I always looked at this as a way to get consulting work ...

settle down somewhere and not move. <<

No, not unless you wanted to. The under-grad student projects will be
with local companies in Salt Lake City or inside the school.


Yes. That's why the stress on MDA and throwing in the MS and IBM
certifications into the program.

Your best bets are University of Texas, Austin; University of
Wisconsin (at least while DeWitt was there) and Stanford. I do not
know what MIT and CAl Tech have going right now.

"Christopher Browne" <cbbrowne (AT) acm (DOT) org> wrote

I am not sure what you think was done around 1988. If I am not mistaken, Ron
Fagin's very important work on higher normal forms was done prior to that
timeframe, and Date, Darwen, McGoveran etc. have produced a lot of novel
work in the last few years.


Blight is a serious problem in a lot of fields. I suggest that the blight in
the DBMS field is much bigger than the blight in the OS field when
practitioners lack the ability to recognize the difference between 1NF and
unnormalized data.