Dr. Guy M. Lohman is Manager of Disruptive Information Management Architectures in the Advanced Information Management Department at IBM Research Division's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, where he has worked for 31 years. He currently manages the Blink research project, which most recently contributed BLU Acceleration to DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows 10.5. From 2007 to 2010, Dr. Lohman’s team invented and developed the Query Engine of the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer for DB2 for z/OS, V1.1 and the Informix Warehouse Accelerator. Dr. Lohman was the architect of the Query Optimizer of DB2 on the Linux, UNIX, and Windows platforms, and was responsible for its development from 1992 to 1997 (versions 2 – 5), as well as the invention and prototyping of Visual Explain and efficient sampling in DB2. During that period, Dr. Lohman also managed the overall effort to incorporate into that DB2 product the Starburst compiler technology that was prototyped at the Almaden Research Center. More recently, he was a co-inventor and designer of the DB2 Index Advisor (now part of the Design Advisor), and co-founder of the DB2 Autonomic Computing project, part of IBM's company-wide Autonomic Computing initiative. From 2004-2006, he was responsible for the design of the extensions to DB2 to optimize XQuery queries in DB2 9. Dr. Lohman was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2002. He is currently the General Chair for ACM's Symposium on Cloud Computing (http://www.socc2013.org/), to be held 1-3 October 2013 at Santa Clara University, and the General Co-Chair of the 2015 IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) to be held 13-16 April 2015 in Seoul, Korea (http://www.icde2015.org). Previously, he was the Chair of the Workgroup on Self-Managing Database Systems (SMDB) of the IEEE Technical Committee on Database Engineering, and on the editorial boards of the “Very Large Data Bases Journal” and “Distributed and Parallel Databases”. His current research interests involve disruptive machine architectures for Business Intelligence, advanced data analytics, query optimization, self-managing database systems, information management appliances, database compression, and autonomic problem determination.

I've spent most of my career in SQL query processing and particularly query optimization for relational database systems, culminating in leading the Research team that invented the Blink technology and, together with DB2 developers, designed and implemented BLU Acceleration for BI queries in DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW)(2010-present) and the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer and Informix Warehouse Accelerator products (2008-2010). Prior to this, I led the Research portion of the DB2 Autonomic Computing project (1999-2005) and the team that developed the DB2 LUW Query Optimizer (1992-1997), based upon the Starburst query optimizer that I invented, designed, and implemented (1986-1991).

Project name Project description

• R*: Distributed Relational database management system prototype based upon the original System R prototype (1982-1986)
• Starburst: Extensible relational database management system prototype, for which I invented the cost-based SQL query optimizer (1986-1992) and Graphical Explain for viewing query plans as graphs.
• DB2 UDB for Linux, Unix, and Windows ("Starwinds"): Incorporated the Starburst query compiler into DB2 UDB for Linux, Unix, and Windows Versions 2 and 5, including component owner of the cost-based query optimizer, and oversaw productization of Graphical Explain as Visual Explain (1992-1996)
• Index Advisor: Invented and implemented in DB2 UDB for LUW (with Gary Valentin, then of SWG Toronto) the Index Advisor, a tool that recommends the best indexes to create for a workload of SQL queries, which shipped in V6 (1996-1999)
• DB2 Autonomic Computing (formerly called SMART (Self-Managing And Resource Tuning)): Co-founded, with SWG Toronto and SVL, a project to make DB2 UDB for LUW more autonomic (1999 - 2005). Includes the LEarning Optimizer (LEO), Progressive OPtimization (POP), and Meta-Optimizer, all to make DB2 query optimization more autonomic and robust; and Design Advisor, to extend the Index Advisor to materialized views, partitioning, and clustering.
• DB2/XML: XQuery Optimization: Extending the DB2 UDB for LUW query optimizer to support optimization of XQuery (including XPath) queries (2003 - 2006).
• Blink: Developing a database management system for Business Intelligence queries that speeds queries by performing most SQL operations on encoded data, exploiting multi-node, multi-core, and SIMD parallelism, and carefully engineering all algorithms to be cache-conscious.

• DB2 BLU: Adding BLU Acceleration for BI queries to DB2
• DB2 Autonomic Computing: Making DB2 autonomic
• DB2 / XML: Adding XQuery to DB2
• LEO: Developing the LEarning Optimizer and related technologies.
• DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW): Part of the extended DB2 LUW family, by incorporating research prototypes into DB2 LUW