Andrew W
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at University of Maryland
Expertise
Computer Science, Math, and basic Physics
Bio
I am a software engineer with experience working in the field of database systems. I have worked at both big companies and startups that focus on improving the state of data management. I am currently a PhD student working on database systems. Database systems are the backbone of today's internet. Both computer programs and humans interact with database systems. Humans build websites and applications that interact with database systems. Data analysts write queries to interact with database systems. For example, a data analyst might write a query to compute "the total sales across all stores broken down by city." A query like this is usually written in SQL and the goal of the database system is to compute that result. Database systems are interesting on their own, but are also a wonderful way to learn about many aspects of Computer Science. Programming is my profession, but also my hobby. In addition to database systems, I have various other programming projects that interest me. Some of them can be found on my github profile: https://github.com/awitten1. Other than programming I enjoy hiking, running , lifting weights, and playing chess!Project ideas
Comparing performance of SQLite and DuckDB
In this project, students learn about two different state of the art database systems optimized for different use cases. The objective will be to understand 1) when to use one database system or another database system 2) why is one system better than another for a given use case. Students in this project will learn how to write SQL queries and use the terminal. We will study this by measuring the performance of different SQL queries.
Microbenchmarking C++ code.
The goal of this project is to learn about how a CPU works. In this project we will write basic C++ programs and study the performance of different C++ snippets. Students will learn how to write basic C++ programs and measure their performance.