Prof. Dr. h.c. Hasso Plattner

The focus of this lecture lies in and around enterprise applications with regards to in-memory databases. The lecture will largely be based on the new book by Plattner and Zeier, which is available for free to all enrolled students. The contents of the lecture include:

* Design
o Introduction to design thinking and how it can help in the software development process
o Design research overview of activities at HPI and Center for Design Research at Stanford University
* Complexity and characteristics of enterprise applications
o Focus on financial accounting
o How accounting systems were built previously and how they can be built simpler today (e.g. reducing complexity by avoiding materialized aggregates)
* Column-oriented, in-memory databases and compression
* Trends in hardware
o The shift from disk to main-memory
o The CPU / memory boundary as the new bottleneck
* Parallel programming
o Why is it hard to introduce parallelism to business applications?
o Multi-core CPUs and how they change the way we must program
* Deployment options
o On-premise vs. Software-as-a-Service
o Massive parallelism by building a cluster of SMP machines (e.g. blade servers)
* Maintenance of software and interface compatibility