SUMMARY

Data is the foundation of modern innovation, decision-making, and operational efficiency. Central to managing this data are databases—organized systems that securely store vast amounts of information.

Transactional systems leverage these databases to perform essential business processes with precision and consistency, often across distributed environments, including cloud and edge computing systems, where data is stored and processed closer to the source. Ensuring the dependability and integrity of these systems is vital for building trust, maintaining operational continuity.

We research and build efficient and dependable database systems for cloud and edge. We specifically focus in transactional guarantees and geo-replication, polyglot access and querying to multiple data sources, and data privacy and security.

OBJECTIVES

Within this domain, our current areas of interest include:

  • Transactions: We research new techniques to implement and ensure the correctness of transactional isolation and recovery mechanisms in database systems. In particular, we focus on distributed environments, namely, when supporting polyglot systems and considering high availability.
  • Dependability and security: Our main goal is the design of scalable, reliable, and highly available database systems by using replication. We also research new approaches for privacy preserving and secure data management in SQL and NoSQL systems and how to make such mechanisms available to applications and end-users.
  • Edge Data processing and management: DBR is investing in researching in inclusion of database management primitives in edge devices. This includes leveraging from existing accelerator units in the edge hardware, and the usage innovative memory options to support maintenance of edge database nodes or small data models. We span from devices with micro-controller, microprocessor or sink nodes. Future work moves into inclusion of data placement, distributed coordination among edge nodes.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

  • CRDV: Conflict-free Replicated Data Views.
    N. Faria, and J. Pereira.
    Proc. ACM Manag. Data (SIGMOD), 2025.
  • When Amnesia Strikes: Understanding and Reproducing Data Loss Bugs with Fault Injection.
    Ramos M, Azevedo J, Kingsbury K, Pereira J, Esteves T, Macedo R & Paulo J.
    Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 2024.
  • Databases in Edge and Fog Environments: A Survey.
    Ferreira, L. and Coelho, F. and Pereira, J..
    ACM Comput. Surv., 2024.
Check the full list of publications here.

CONTACT

José Pereira

Associate professor