This post was invited at the ACM SIGMOD Blog; it provides some initial discussion on one of our new projects at DASlab about self-designing data systems. 

We keep designing new data systems over and over again. We ask two questions in this post: 1) Is this sustainable in the long term? 2) Can we make this process faster?

The need for new data system designs

“Big data” may be mostly a marketing term as opposed to a research one but it is starting to have a tremendous...