A University of Sydney alumnus and Oracle employee has been awarded a prize for his research into database management.
Dr Michael Cahill won the 2010 Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation prize, awarded for outstanding doctoral work by an IT student.
Cahill developed an algorithm to improve data consistency in multi-user databases for his thesis titled Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases.
The algorithm challenges problems which occur when thousands of people access a database at once.
“I looked at algorithms used in real systems and made them more practical,” Cahill said in a ststement. “I’ve changed the algorithm in multiversion systems so they keep track of more information.
“By tipping back information about concurrent operating systems the algorithm can guarantee the traditional kind of correctness or, to use the correct terminology, prevent analogies.”
The prize was awarded last month at Australasian Computer Science Week.
Cahill’s algorithm has been applied to some open source systems and its potential use with commercial vendors is under discussion.
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