Assignment 1: Technology Review

DUE MONDAY JANUARY 29 at 11:59PM.

List of Technologies
The Assignment
Submission and Grading

In this assignment, we would like you to select 3 technologies/product categories of your choice (in order of priority) which will enable us to form groups for technology presentation. Your chosen technologies must cover at least 2 out of the 3 groups (A, B, C) given below. To the extend possible, we will place you in a team with your preferred choice of technology.

List of Technologies

ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems (e.g., SAP, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage)
CRM (customer relationship management) products (e.g., Salesforce, Siebel, PeopleSoft)
Data warehousing products (e.g., Snowflake, IBM Db2, Amazon Redshift)
Data Mining Tools and Products; OLAP products (e.g., Oracle OLAP, IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy)
Document Management systems (e.g., Microsoft SharePoint, Dropbox, Confluence)

B. CORE DBMS TECHNOLOGIES

Non-relational Data management Systems (e.g., NoSQL systems such as Cassandra, MongoDB, HBase, Redis). They include:
- Column based
- Document-based
- Key-value based
Main memory data management systems (e.g., Oracle’s TimesTen and Exadata, SAP’s HANA, Spark)
Cloud platform offerings for data management (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud)

C. EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

Time-Series Database Systems (e.g., InfluxDB, TimescaleDB )
Graph Database Systems (e.g., Neo4j, Amazon Neptune)
Vector Database Systems (e.g., Pinecone, Milvus, Weaviate)
Data Visualization:
- Visualization tools (e.g., Power BI, Tableau)
- Visualization libraries (e.g., D3.js, Plotly.js, Vega-Lite)
Semantic Web Technology and related concepts such as RDF, SPARQL, OWL
Data Integration Systems and Tools (e.g., Trifacta, tamr)
Data Security and Identity Management systems (e.g., Okta, RSA SecurID, Persona)
Statistical and Machine Learning technologies applied to databases

The Assignment

Write about technologies in order of your priority. For each technology from the list that you select, do the following-

1) Write the name of the technology/topic first. Give a reason for why you are interested in presenting this topic. Discuss why you feel it is important to study this technology.
2) Survey at least two commercial products or systems (if commercial products are not easily located, research and development systems will work) by stating what functionality they provide and how they work (5~7 sentences for each product).
3) Write a few sentences about your general understanding of the products and how they appear to you (is this technology mature, does it need a lot more research, etc.)
4) Mention a research paper from a reputable research source and say what this paper is about, and how it is related to your topic in a couple of sentences. Just giving a URL link to some web resource, a blog or a white paper is NOT acceptable. Your reference should be a legitimate high-quality published paper. Please refer to this resource page for guidelines on finding high quality database publications and for how to write the reference properly. Please use the APA format for your citations.

For your top technology of choice, write a short paragraph on what you will include in your presentation in class as a group if you were to present this technology (each technology topic will be presented for about 30 mins) by roughly a team of 4 students.

Submission and Grading

Fill out this survey to indicate your top three choices of technologies.

Submit a PDF with your technology review on canvas. The total submission should not exceed 5-6 pages, using reasonably font size (e.g., 12) and word spacing (e.g., 1.15-2). For each topic, we will grade based on following criteria:

Discussed motivation for studying the topic / why is it important to study the topic
Discussed 2 commercial products, functionality and how they work
Discussed state of the product and general understanding
Discussed research paper, cited it properly and included a description

This is an individual assignment and it is worth 10% of your grade.