Abstract: I will present an overview of some of the open challenges and opportunities for structured data management that are especially relevant for today’s world of Big Data and the Cloud. In the second half of the talk, I will discuss in depth one of the opportunities – approximate query processing – and reflect on why this technology is not mainstream in today’s data platforms.

Bio: Surajit Chaudhuri is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research and leads the Data Management, Exploration and Mining group. He also works closely with Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Division. Surajit’s current areas of interest are Big Data platforms, self-manageability, and cloud database services. Working with his colleagues in Microsoft Research, he helped incorporate the Database Engine Tuning Advisor and Data Cleaning technology in Microsoft SQL Server. Surajit is an ACM Fellow, a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a VLDB 10-year Best Paper Award, and an IEEE Data Engineering Influential Paper Award.