BILLERICA, Massachusetts, February 25 /PRNewswire/ --

- US$5000 prize to develop best indexing system for main memory data

Vertica Systems announced today that it is sponsoring the first annual
Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) programming contest.
Students at a degree-granting institution have until March 15, 2009, to
submit a prototype for consideration as a finalist to participate in a
bake-off at this year's Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) SIGMOD
conference in Providence, Rhode Island. Vertica, in conjunction with a grant
from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and additional funding from
Microsoft Corp., is sponsoring the contest to generate better ideas in
transactional indexing systems for main memory data.

As a leading international forum for database researchers, practitioners,
developers and users, this year's ACM SIGMOD will be held June 29, 2009 to
July 2, 2009, at the Westin Hotel in Providence, Rhode Island. In addition to
providing support for the development of the software to run the contest,
funds from NSF, Vertica and Microsoft will be used to cover travel costs for
students from each team of finalists to attend the conference and the
finalist bake-off. In addition, Vertica and Microsoft have contributed funds
to award the winning team a US$5,000 prize.

"From daily business to advanced scientific inquiry, efficient management
of data sets is increasingly important to our lives," said Samuel Madden,
associate professor at MIT, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Department. "We're hoping this contest will spur interest in next-generation
DBMSs and produce technology innovation in transactional storage systems."

The goal of the contest is to design an index for main memory data
capable of supporting exact match queries and range queries, as well as
updates, inserts and deletes. The submitted system must also support
serializable execution of user-specified transactions but does not need to
support crash recovery. Submissions may be written in any language, but an
x86 shared-library and source code that conforms to a supplied build
environment is required.

"The Jim Gray Systems Lab is focused on shaping the future direction of
data management," said David DeWitt, technical fellow in the Data and Storage
Platform Division at Microsoft and director of the Jim Gray Systems Lab at
the University of Wisconsin - Madison. "This contest is an opportunity to
bring innovative new implementations to the forefront. We hope to see some
great ideas come from the entries."

Full details on the contest requirements, including the benchmark,
details on data structures, the test workload and hardware platform can be
found at http://db.csail.mit.edu/sigmod09contest/. A submission site to
upload implementations will be provided as the final deadline approaches.

Contestants must supply the source code for their entries and agree to
license their code under the BSD or MIT open source license should their
system win the contest.

About Vertica

Vertica Systems is the market innovator for high-performance analytic
database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware.
Co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Vertica has developed
column-oriented analytic database technology with an MPP architecture that
lets companies of any size store and query very large databases orders of
magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. The Vertica
Analytic Database is available as software only, as an appliance or online as
a cloud computing solution. The technology's unmatched speed, scalability,
flexibility and ease of use helps customers like JP Morgan Chase, Verizon,
Mozilla, Comcast, Level 3 Communications and Vonage capitalize on business
opportunities in real time. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, Mass. For
more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.vertica.com.