Communications of the ACM
Ulterior Motives
Margo Seltzer, the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems at the University of British Columbia and 2023–2024 ACM Athena Lecturer, is the kind of researcher who stands out not just for her accomplishments, but for her tirelessness. After building a database software library that underpinned many first-generation Internet services, she worked on topics that range from file systems and storage to capturing and accessing data provenance. Here, she speaks with Leah Hoffmann about finding impactful research projects—and keeping up with everything that's going on in the field.
The story of Berkeley DB, the database software library that you built with Keith Bostic and Mike Olson, has been told before at greater length, but let me see if I can summarize. Your work on packages such as hash and B-tree was released with Berkeley Unix as the DB 1.85 library. Then, as a side project, you and Mike created a transactional storage system—which Netscape later wanted to integrate into the LDAP directory server it was building on a Berkeley DB core. That prompted you and Keith to launch Sleepycat Software and create a production-quality transactional library. Before Netscape approached you, did you guys ever think, "maybe we should commercialize, maybe there's something there"?
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