[Students] [Teaching] [Publications] [Funding] [Calendar]

I am currently an assitant professor at University at Buffalo, Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Current research interest: database management systems. Specifically, my current focus is on traditional and approximate query processing and query optimization, database on modern hardware, transaction processing, indexing and storage.

Prior to joining UB, I graduated with a PhD degree in computer science from the School of Computing at University of Utah in 2021. My PhD advisors were Prof. Feifei Li and Prof. Jeff Phillips. I hold a Bachelor's degree from the ACM Class of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. In Fall 2015, I worked as a research assistant at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was supervised by Prof. Eric Lo. My undergraduate research advisor at SJTU was Prof. Kenny Zhu. I was supported by the Google PhD Fellowship from Fall 2019 to Spring 2021.

Students

Current

• Yunnan Yu (PhD student)
• Congying Wang (PhD student)
• Gaoxiang Liu (PhD student, co-advised with Prof. Ziming Zhao)
• Michael Beards (Undergraduate research intern @ UB)
• Anirudh Nallana (Graduate research intern @ UB)
• Linyu Wu (Remote undergraduate research intern @ Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
• Zhuoran Li (Remote undergraduate research intern @ Hangzhou Dianzi University)

Alumni

• Nithin Sastry Tellapuri (MS, graduated in Fall 2023, first employment: AirPay)

Teaching

• CSE462/562: Database Systems, SP22, SP23, SP24, FA24
• CSE662: Languages and Runtimes for Big Data, FA23, FA24
• CSE707 Seminar: Modern Database Systems, FA21, FA22

Publications

         

• (To appear) Low-Latency Transaction Scheduling via Userspace Interrupts: Why Wait or Yield When You can Preempt?
  by K. Huang, J. Zhou, Z. Zhao, D. Xie, T. Wang
  In Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2025), Volume TBD, Issue TBD, pages TBD, Berlin, Germany, 2025. [code]
• FastPDB: Towards Bag-Probabilistic Queries at Interactive Speeds
  by A. Huber, O. Kennedy, A. Rudra, Z. Zhao, S. Feng, B. Glavic
  In Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2025), Volume 3, Issue 1, pages 1-25, Berlin, Germany, 2025. [code]
• Towards Systematic Index Dynamization [code]
  by D. Rumbaugh, D. Xie, Z. Zhao
  In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 17, Issue 11(VLDB 2024), pages 2867-2879, Guangzhou, China, 2024.
• GLIN: A Generic Learned Indexing Mechanism for Complex Geometries
  by C. Wang, J. Yu, Z. Zhao
  In Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Analytics for Big Geospatial Data (BigSpatial 2023), pages 1-12, Hamburg, Germany, November 2023. [code]
• Approximate Queries over Concurrent Updates [code]
  by C. Wang, N. Tellapuri, S. Keshannagari, D. Zinsley, Z. Zhao, D. Xie
  In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 16, Issue 12(VLDB 2023, demo paper), pages 3986-3989, Vancouver, Canada, September 2023.
• AB-tree: index for concurrent random sampling and updates   [code]
  by Z. Zhao, D. Xie, F. Li
  In Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 15, Issue 9 (VLDB 2022), pages 1835 - 1847, Sydney, Australia, September 2022.
• At-the-time and Back-in-time Persistent Sketches [code available on ACM Digital Library]
  by B. Shi, Z. Zhao, Y. Peng, F. Li, J. Phillips
  In Proceedings of 40th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2021), pages 1623-1636, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China, June 2021.
• Efficient Join Synopsis Maintenance for Data Warehouse   [code]
  by Z. Zhao, F. Li, Y. Liu
  In Proceedings of 39th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2020), pages 2027-2042, Portland, USA, June 2020.
• SolarDB: Towards a Shared-Everything Database on Distributed Log-Structured Storage
  by T. Zhu, Z. Zhao, F. Li, W. Qian, A. Zhou, D. Xie, R. Stutsman, H. Li, H. Hu
  In ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 15, Issue 2, Article No. 11, June 2019.
• * Wander Join and XDB: Online Aggregation via Random Walks
  by F. Li, B. Wu, K. Yi, Z. Zhao
  In ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), Volume 44, Issue 1, Article No. 2, January 2019.
• InferSpark: Statistical Inference at Scale
  by Z. Zhao, J. Pei, K. Zhu, E. Lo, C. Liu.
  In 2019 IEEE International Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing (BigComp 2019), pages 1-8, Kyoto, Japan, February 2019.
• Solar: Towards a Shared-Everything Database on Distributed Log-Structured Storage
  by T. Zhu, Z. Zhao, F. Li, W. Qian, A. Zhou, D. Xie, R. Stutsman, H. Li, H. Hu
  In Proceedings of the 2018 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pages 795-807, Boston, USA, July 2018.
• Random Sampling over Joins Revisited   [code]
  by Z. Zhao, R. Christensen, F. Li, X. Hu, K. Yi.
  In Proceedings of 37th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2018), pages 1525-1539, Houston, USA, June 2018.
• * Wander Join and XDB: Online Aggregation via Random Walks
  by F. Li, B. Wu, K. Yi, Z. Zhao
  In SIGMOD Record, 2017.
• * Wander Join: Online Aggregation via Random Walks, Best Paper Award   [project page] [code]
  by F. Li, B. Wu, K. Yi, Z. Zhao
  In Proceedings of 35th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2016), pages 615-629, San Francisco, USA, June 2016.
• * Wander Join: Online Aggregation for Joins
  by F. Li, B. Wu, K. Yi, Z. Zhao
  In Proceedings of 35th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Demo Paper, (SIGMOD 2016), pages 2121-2124, San Francisco, USA, June 2016.

       * authors listed in alphabetic order

Funding

We are grateful for the funding/gift support for our past and ongoing research from National Science Foundation and Google.

• CAREER: Speedy and Reliable Approximate Queries in Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Systems. Single PI, NSF IIS/III, Award #2339596, 5/15/2024 - 04/30/2029, $599,977.
• Unrestricted Google gift. Single PI, November 2021, $30,000.