Thomas Bodner

Ph.D. Student
Email:
Phone: +49-(0)331 5509 - 3934
Office: Campus II, F-1.06
Office Hours: Just stop by or mail/call ahead for an appointment
Profiles: DBLP, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, GitHub, LinkedIn

I am a Computer Science Ph.D. student in the Database Group at HPI, supervised by Tilmann Rabl and Hasso Plattner. The goal of my research is to make database systems cheaper and faster through the unique capabilities of modern cloud environments. I am particularly interested in all aspects around query processing on serverless cloud infrastructure. To explore this research area, I have started the Skyrise project. Before joining HPI, I have built databases at SAP, TU Berlin, UC Irvine, and IBM.

Research Area: Cloud Database Systems

Data Processing on Elastic Cloud Resources

Analytical data products, such as business intelligence reports and machine learning models, require processing large amounts of data using extensive computational resources. Traditionally, provisioning resources involves high up-front expenses. The cloud, as a short-term provisioning model, provides cost-effective access to pools of resources and, as a result, is the standard for deploying data processing systems today. Recently, serverless cloud computing embodies resource pools that are highly elastic. This elasticity has the potential to make cloud-based systems easier to use and more cost-efficient, avoiding complex resource management and under-utilization.

We evaluate this so-called serverless infrastructure regarding its performance elasticity and variability. Based on our findings, we build the Skyrise serverless query processor that interhits the elastic scalability of its underlying FaaS infrastructure while it deals with the limitations and inefficiencies. Skyrise enables cost-efficient, interactive analytics on infrequently accessed data, a workload for which conventionally provisioned database systems are idle most of the time and thus not viable.

Publications

Data Processing on Elastic Cloud Resources @ BTW ACloudDM 2025
Thomas Bodner, Tilmann Rabl
> Abstract
A Demonstration of Skyrise: A Serverless Query Processor @ BTW 2025
Thomas Bodner, Tilmann Rabl
> Paper
Skyrise: Exploiting Serverless Cloud Infrastructure for Elastic Data Processing @ DASP 2025
Thomas Bodner, Daniel Ritter, Martin Boissier, Tilmann Rabl
> Preprint
An Interactive Analysis of Serverless Cloud Infrastructure @ EDBT 2025
Thomas Bodner, Tilmann Rabl
> Paper
An Empirical Evaluation of Serverless Cloud Infrastructure for Large-Scale Data Processing @ EDBT 2025
Thomas Bodner, Theo Radig, David Justen, Daniel Ritter, Tilmann Rabl
> Paper > Preprint
A Case for Ecological Efficiency in Database Server Lifecycles @ CIDR 2025
Thomas Bodner, Martin Boissier, Tilmann Rabl, Ricardo Salazar-Díaz, Florian Schmeller, Nils Strassenburg, Ilin Tolovski, Marcel Weisgut, Wang Yue
> Paper > Slides > Code
POLAR: Adaptive and Non-invasive Join Order Selection via Plans of Least Resistance @ VLDB 2024
David Justen, Daniel Ritter, Campbell Fraser, Andrew Lamb, Nga Tran, Allison Lee, Thomas Bodner, Mhd Yamen Haddad, Steffen Zeuch, Volker Markl, Matthias Böhm
> Paper > Slides > Poster > Code
BabelMR: A Polyglot Framework for Serverless MapReduce @ VLDB SDA 2023
Fabian Mahling, Paul Rößler, Thomas Bodner, Tilmann Rabl
> Paper > Slides > Code
Doppler: Understanding Serverless Query Execution @ SIGMOD BiDEDE 2022
Thomas Bodner, Tobias Pietz, Lars Jonas Bollmeier, Daniel Ritter
> Paper > Slides > Code
Elastic Query Processing on Function as a Service Platforms @ VLDB PhD Workshop 2020
Thomas Bodner
> Paper > Slides
Towards Scalable Real-time Analytics: An Architecture for Scale-out of OLXP Workloads @ VLDB 2015
Anil Goel, Jeffrey Pound, Nathan Auch, Peter Bumbulis, Scott MacLean, Franz Färber, Francis Gropengiesser, Christian Mathis, Thomas Bodner, Wolfgang Lehner
> Paper
Myriad: Parallel Data Generation on Shared-nothing Architectures @ PACT ASBD 2011
Alexander Alexandrov, Berni Schiefer, John Poelman, Stephan Ewen, Thomas Bodner, Volker Markl
> Paper > Code

Patents

Generation of Bots Based on Observed Behavior
Gregor Berg, Andre Niklas Wenz, Bernhard Hoeppner, Thomas Bodner, Olga Cherepanova, Lasse Steffen, Jan Siebert, David Hennemann, Pascal Schulze, Konstantin Dobler, Kris-Fillip Kahl, Paul Udo Beneke, Philipp Bernhard Hoberg
> US 2019 > US 2021 > US 2024
An Algorithm for Consistent Replication of Log-Structured Data
Peter Bumbulis, Jeffrey Pound, Nathan Auch, Anil Goel, Matthias Ringwald, Thomas Bodner, Scott MacLean
> US 2016 > EP 2017

Students

Paper Supervision:

Fabian Mahling and Paul Rößler, published workshop paper @ VLDB SDA 2023
David Justen, published abstract @ SIGMOD SRC 2022

Master Thesis Supervision:

Hybrid Serverless/Serverful Query Execution, Lars Jonas Bollmeier, 2024
Elastic Data Shuffling on Cloud Function Memory, Moritz Manner, 2023
Single Node Performance for In-situ Serverless Query Processing, Theo Radig, 2023
Cost-aware Pruning with Filters in Serverless Data Management, Timon Millich, 2022
Serverless Maintenance of Database Statistics and Cached Query Results, Pascal Schulze, 2022
Cost-efficiency and Robustness in Serverless Join Processing, David Justen, 2021
Query Compilation for Distributed Execution with Cloud Functions, Julian Menzler, 2021
Straggler Mitigation in Distributed Query Execution on Cloud Functions, Fabian Engel, 2021
Elastic Query Execution via Short-lived and Stateless Cloud Functions, Jan Mensch, 2020
Network Request Handling in Database Systems, Toni Stachewicz, 2019
Data-dependent Implicit Authorizations for Fine-grained Database Access Control, Dennis Hempfing, 2018
Pushing Down User-defined Functionality in Distributed Log-centric Big Data Stacks, Josephine Rückert (from TU Ilmenau), 2017