PLEASE NOTE THE DAY CHANGE. Since the second Tuesday falls on Valentines Day, we are moving our meeting to Wednesday, February 15—same location and time.

We are pleased to welcome Ori Herrnstadt of Akiban Technologies this month. His talk is entitled "Renormalize."

As operational database schemas become complex, users resort to denormalization to handle performance issues. This includes a range of techniques from materialized views to using MySQL as a key-value store for blobs containing full objects. While denormalization solves immediate bottlenecks, it comes at a hefty price.

In this presentation Ori will explore common denormalization approaches and tradeoffs using real world examples. He will then present a solution under development at Akiban Technologies to alleviate these same problems much more efficiently, and allow users to get the best of both worlds.

About Ori
Ori Herrnstadt is co-founder and CTO of Akiban. He has been involved in developing large operational database systems since his days in the Israeli Army. After experiencing common problems of large-scale operational systems in military, healthcare, enterprise ERP, CRM systems and modern web applications, he developed the Orthogonal Architecture. In 2009, he co-founded Akiban Technologies to accelerate the development of the technology.

About Akiban
Akiban changes the relational database market through its patent-pending table-grouping technology. Table-grouping provides a powerful model to eliminate the cost of SQL joins, which leads to breakthrough advances in performance. The technology can be incrementally adopted into existing infrastructure and is easily scaled out in virtualized environments or across commodity hardware, eliminating the need to change the architecture of existing database applications.

Akiban is preparing the release of Akiban Server, an open source relational database platform that transforms performance and scalability by eliminating the cost of joins. Akiban will be open core (AGPL3) and encourages both commercial and non-commercial use.