Interviews and focus groups with University of Washington researchers revealed a need across disciplines for simple and scalable data management. In response, the UW eScience Institute has developed SQLShare, a software-as-a-service platform for lightweight data manipulation, query, and sharing. SQLShare is designed to significantly reduce the effort required to build, maintain, and exploit a database management system by reducing operation to a simple Upload-Query-Share workflow: researchers upload data directly through a browser, then write queries to clean and process their data, link it with other sources, and analyze the results process, restructure, and analyze the results, then share their queries with other users for collaboration and publication purposes. Even researchers with zero programming experience are able to self-train in using SQL and SQLShare with only a few examples to get them started. The architecture is entirely cloud-based to ease dministration, with components running on both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. SQLShare supports hundreds of users on and off the UW campus, and is available for public use. SQLShare is also positioned as an exemplar in technology transfer: it was conceived and funded as a research project, co-developed by central IT and Computer Science researchers, and support is in the process of being incorporated into UW's suite of permanent campus services.
In this talk, I'll present our work on SQLShare and describe our roadmap for the future.
Biography: Dr. Howe is the Director of Research in Scalable Data Analytics at the University of Washington eScience Institute and an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department, where he studies scientific databases, data-intensive scalable computing, and visual analytics. Howe has received two Jim Gray Seed Grant awards from Microsoft Research for work on managing environmental data, some paper awards for work in data-intensive computing for science, and has written three book chapters in the area. Howe serves on the program and organizing committees for a number of conferences in the area of databases and scientific data management, and serves on advisory boards for multiple companies in the area of scientific data management. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Portland State University and a Bachelor's degree in Industrial & Systems Engineering from Georgia Tech.
