Database research at HASLab is motivated by the key role played by database systems in modern society, triggering a lot of interest from research to industry such as cloud computing, internet-of-things, storage formats for data processing or machine learning/artificial intelligence.

The core team has a strong background in fault-tolerant agreement and group communication protocols and several years ago started applying them on the research and implementation of advanced database replication based on group communication.

With the rise of massive applications such as social networking platforms, the team research focus on a new generation of elastic data management solutions, that can scale both in the sheer volume of data that can be held but also in how required resources can be dynamically and incrementally provisioned. This includes both work on elastic data management for cloud computing environments from high-throughput online querying to elastic workload aware tuple store management; novel strategies for parallel SQL query language engine and parallel execution of window functions; research on data lakes support in SQL query engines to use data from external stores.

Despite its many benefits, cloud solutions have been designed without strong data confidentiality guarantees. To overcome the lack of privacy guarantees in the cloud, the team is working on a new area, secure data processing, that aims at building practical database systems that follow a privacy-by-design methodology.

By covering a large spectrum of nowadays Database research, we intend to contribute to the next generation of secure, distributed, scalable and fault-tolerant database systems that are able to seamlessly adapt to heterogeneous hardware configurations powered by current cloud computing infraestructures and able to adapt to sheer volume of data handled today and the expected increase in years to come (for more details please see Research).

News

20 October 2021

Rui Souto has completed his MSc thesis titled: Query Optimizers Based on Machine Learning Techniques. Congratulations!.

4 December 2020

Luis Ferreira has completed his MSc thesis titled: Automatic Parameter Tuning Using Reinforcement Learning. Congratulations!.

16 December 2020

Nuno Faria has completed his MSc thesis titled: High Performance Data Processing. Congratulations!.

12 May 2020

AIDA project led by Mobileum, jointly with us, University of Coimbra and CMU Portugal, has officially started.

14 Feb 2020

New CMU Portugal large-scale collaborative research project AIDA has been accepted.

17 November 2019

Cláudia Brito earned a PhD grant from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia!

8 November 2019

Hugo Carvalho has completed his MSc thesis titled: SafeSpark: A secure data analytics platform using cryptographic technics and trusted hardware. Congratulations!.

8 November 2019

Hugo Abreu has completed his MSc thesis titled: A High-Availability architecture for cloud based databases. Congratulations!.

26 June 2018

The Database Research @ HASLab website is now live

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