School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Seoul National University
Email: chask at snu.ac.kr Tel: 82-2-880-7319
Secretary: Ms. Seyeon Kim (Tel: 82-2-874-7812)
Performance-oriented mission-critical software development management
Recent Professional Activities
VLDB Journal Editor (2009 ~ 2014)
VLDB 2011 Demo Program Committee member
ICDE Demo Program Committee member (2008, 2012)
VLDB 2009 Core Database Technology Program Committee member
ICDE 2009 Research Program Committee member (area: query processing, query optimization, database tuning, and autonomic databases)
VLDB 2008 Industrial Program Committee member
VLDB 2006 Industrial Program Committee Co-Chair
VLDB 2006 Organizer and Moderator of Panel
"Globalization: Challenges to Database Community" (Participants: C Mohan at IBM India, Vishal Sikka at SAP, Meichun Hsu at HP Lab, Rajeev Rastogi at Bell Lab India, Honesty Young at IBM China Research, Li-Zhu Zhou at Tsinghua Univ.)
IEEE ICDE 2006 Program Committee Area Vice-Chair in DBMS Internals and Performance
DASFAA 2003 PC Co-Chair (with Prof. Mastoshi Yoshigawa in Japan)
Major Achievement
Founded Transact In Memory, Inc. in Silicon Valley in 2002 (also its wholly-owned subsudiary TIM System in Korea in 2000) to fund the development of the next-generation in-memory DBMS (known as P*TIME) and has led it to the successful acquisition by SAP (the #1 global business software company) in 2005. SAP transformed TIM System to SAP Labs Korea and made an official announcement in March 2008.
P*TIME implemented numerous unique (thus patented) architectural features: parallel differential logging and recovery (published in ICDE 2001), cache-conscious index structures (like one published in SIGMOD 2001), cache-conscious index concurrency control with optimistic latch-free index traversal (published in VLDB 2001), and a memory-centric MVCC (multi-version concurrency control).
Led the development of the first-generation in-memory database storage engine based on the conventional architecture in 1990's . With partial indirect funding from the Korean government for development, this engine was delivered to a government research institute in early 1997, and has become the basis of a commercial in-memory DBMS, which now has numerous deployments in Korea, especially, in telecom and financial services.
Dr. Sang Kyun Cha has been a professor at Seoul National University in School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science since February 1992.
In 2000, he founded Transact In Memory, Inc. (TIM) in Korea to fund the next-generation In-Memory Database engine development and in 2002 moved its headquarter to Silicon Valley. In November 2005, TIM was acquired by SAP and its Korean entity was transformed to SAP Labs Korea. By SAP's request, he continues to lead SAP Labs Korea and contributes to SAP's HANA In-Memory DB development.
He received his Ph.D. in database systems at Stanford University in 1991 with Gio Wiederhold. Before joining the university, he experienced working at various global IT companies: Computer Science Center of Texas Instruments, Inc. (in 1985), IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center (as a consultant in 1990-1991) and HP Laboratories, Palo Alto (an in-memory personal data management project, from 1991 to 1992).
From August 2001 to August 2002, he visited the database research group in Computer Science Department of Stanford University and was responsible for organizing CS545 InfoSeminar course.
In March 2012, he was elected as an external director on the board of KT (Korea Telecom).
Stanford InfoLab Seminar:
The 20-year-long Stanford seminar series on database research and technology. I organized
this seminar during the Fall and Spring quarters of the 2001-2002 academic year.
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