I have moved. See my current webpage at:

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).

About Me

In 2010, I obtained my bachelor's degree in computer science from the university of Magdeburg in Germany, followed by my master's degree in 2012. At the moment, I am a PhD student at Dortmund University of Technology working on query optimization for heterogeneous processor environments. In particular, I am focusing on efficient co-processor utilization and hardware-oblivious query optimization. In the course of my research, I developed two systems: 1) The hardware-oblivious query optimization framework HyPE, and 2) CoGaDB, a GPU-accelerated column store targeting OLAP workloads. In 2013, I helped to organize the German database conference “BTW” in Magdeburg. Furthermore, I am also co-organizing the “German community meetup for GPUs in databases” in Dortmund as well as the “International Workshop on Data (Co-)Processing on Heterogeneous Hardware“ (DAPHNE), which is a colocated workshop at EDBT/ICDT 2015.

My Research

For a decade, the database community explored graphics processing units and other co-processors to accelerate query processing. While the developed algorithms often outperform their CPU counterparts, it is quite challenging to accelerate database engines with co-processors. In my PhD project, we counter these challenges by a hardware-oblivious query optimizer. The key feature is that we place operators on (co-)processors without detailed information about the hardware. For this, we use a learning-based run-time estimator that continuously observes the run-time of database operators on different processors and adapts its performance models and operator placement decisions accordingly. As part of the project we developed an open-source library called HyPE (Hybrid Query Processing Engine) that implements the techniques we developed. HyPE is used as physical query optimizer for operator placement by our database mangement system CoGaDB and was also integrated in the hardware oblivious database engine Ocelot.

Research Interests

• Database Query Processing on Co-Processors
• Datamanagement on new Hardware
• Self-Tuning

Research Projects

• CoGaDB
• HyPE Library

Teaching (in German)

Winter term 2014/2015

• Architecture and Implementation of Databases

Summer term 2014

• Information Systems

Winter term 2013/2014

• Transaktionsverwaltung
• Scientific Project on Databases and Software Engineering

Summer term 2013

• Datenmanagement (DM)
• Advanced Topics in Databases (AdvDB, in English)
• Datenbanken: Implementierungstechniken (DB II)
• Scientific Project: Database Query Processing on GPUs

Winter term 2012/2013

• Transaktionsverwaltung
• Data-Warehouse-Technologien

Summer term 2012

• Datenmanagement (DM)
• Advanced Topics in Databases (AdvDB, in English)
• Datenbanken: Implementierungstechniken (DB II)

Selected Publications

2015

• Sebastian Dorok, Sebsatian Breß, Jens Teubner, and Gunter Saake. Flexible Analysis of Plant Genomes in a Database Management System. In International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), pages 509–512. OpenProceedings.org, 2015.
• Andreas Meister, Sebastian Breß, and Gunter Saake. Toward GPU-accelerated Database Optimization. Datenbank-Spektrum, 15(2):131–140, 2015.

2014

• Sebastian Breß, Norbert Siegmund, Max Heimel, Michael Saecker, Tobias Lauer, Ladjel Bellatreche, and Gunter Saake. Load-Aware Inter-Co-Processor Parallelism in Database Query Processing. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2014. doi: 10.1016/j.datak.2014.07.003.
• Sebastian Breß, Max Heimel, Norbert Siegmund, Ladjel Bellatreche, and Gunter Saake. GPU-accelerated Database Systems: Survey and Open Challenges. Transactions on Large-Scale Data and Knowledge-Centered Systems (TLDKS), December 2014.
• Sebastian Breß, Max Heimel, Michael Saecker, Bastian Köcher, Volker Markl, and Gunter Saake. Ocelot/HyPE: Optimized Data Processing on Heterogeneous Hardware. PVLDB, 7(13), 2014.
• David Broneske, Sebastian Breß, Max Heimel, and Gunter Saake. Toward Hardware-Sensitive Database Operations. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), pages 229–234. OpenProceedings.org, 2014.
• Max Heimel, Filip Haase, Martin Meinke, Sebastian Breß, Michael Saecker, and Volker Markl. Demonstrating Self-Learning Algorithm Adaptivity in a Hardware-Oblivious Database Engine. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), pages 616–619. OpenProceedings.org, 2014.
• Sebastian Dorok, Sebastian Breß, and Gunter Saake. Toward Efficient Variant Calling inside Main-Memory Database Systems. In International Workshop on Biological Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (BIOKDD-DEXA). IEEE, 2014.
• Sebastian Dorok, Sebastian Breß, Horstfried Läpple, and Gunter Saake. Toward Efficient and Reliable Genome Analysis using Main Memory Database Systems. In International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM). ACM, 2014.
• Andreas Meister, Sebastian Breß, and Gunter Saake. Cost-Aware Query Optimization during Cloud-Based Complex Event Processing. In Data Management in the Cloud (DMC), Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), 2014.

2013

• Sebastian Breß, Felix Beier, Hannes Rauhe, Kai-Uwe Sattler, Eike Schallehn, and Gunter Saake. Efficient Co-Processor Utilization in Database Query Processing. Information Systems, 38(8):1084–1096, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2013.05.004.
• Sebastian Breß, Norbert Siegmund, Ladjel Bellatreche, and Gunter Saake. An Operator-Stream-based Scheduling Engine for Effective GPU Coprocessing. In 17th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS), pages 288–301. Springer, 2013.
• Sebastian Breß, Max Heimel, Norbert Siegmund, Ladjel Bellatreche, and Gunter Saake. Exploring the Design Space of a GPU-aware Database Architecture. In ADBIS workshop on GPUs In Databases (GID), pages 225–234. Springer, 2013.
• Sebastian Breß. Why it is Time for a HyPE: A Hybrid Query Processing Engine for Efficient GPU Coprocessing in DBMS. In The VLDB PhD workshop. VLDB Endowment, 2013.

2012

• Sebastian Breß, Siba Mohammad, and Eike Schallehn. Self-Tuning Distribution of DB-Operations on Hybrid CPU/GPU Platforms. In Proceedings of the 24st Workshop Grundlagen von Datenbanken (GvD), pages 89–94. CEUR-WS, 2012.
• Sebastian Breß, Eike Schallehn, and Ingolf Geist. Towards Optimization of Hybrid CPU/GPU Query Plans in Database Systems. In Second ADBIS workshop on GPUs In Databases (GID), pages 27–35. Springer, 2012.
• Sebastian Breß, Felix Beier, Hannes Rauhe, Eike Schallehn, Kai-Uwe Sattler, and Gunter Saake. Automatic Selection of Processing Units for Coprocessing in Databases. In 16th East-European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS), pages 57–70. Springer, 2012.
• Sebastian Breß, Ingolf Geist, Eike Schallehn, Maik Mory, and Gunter Saake. A Framework for Cost based Optimization of Hybrid CPU/GPU Query Plans in Database Systems. Control and Cybernetics, 41(4):715–742, 2012. (PDF)