Cong Yan

I am a senior researcher at the data systems group in Microsoft Research, Redmond. I obtained my Ph.D. degree at University of Washington, adviced by Alvin Cheung. I'm interested in using program analysis to improve the performance and usability of data management systems.

Email: congyan.me [at] gmail.com

Publications

• Predicate Pushdown for Data Science Pipelines Cong Yan, Yin Lin, Yeye He SIGMOD'23, Best paper award
• Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples Peng Li, Yeye He, Cong Yan, Yue Wang, Surajit Chaudhuri VLDB'23, Best paper award
• Leveraging Application Data Constraints to Optimize Database-Backed Web Applications Lily Liu, Shuxian Wang, Mengzhu Sun, Sicheng Pan, Ge Li, Siddharth Jha, Cong Yan, Junwen Yang, Shan Lu, Alvin Cheung VLDB'23
• SlabCity: Whole-Query Optimization using Program Synthesis Rui Dong, Jie Liu, Yuxuan Zhu, Cong Yan, Barzan Mozafari, Xinyu Wang VLDB'23
• Generating Test Databases for Database-Backed Applications Cong Yan, Suman Nath, Shan Lu ICSE'23
• Releasing Locks As Early As You Can: Reducing Contention of Hotspots by Violating Two-Phase Locking Zhihan Guo, Kan Wu, Cong Yan, Xiangyao Yu SIGMOD'21
• Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Cong Yan and Yeye He SIGMOD'20
• Demonstration of Chestnut: An In-memory Data Layout Designer for Database Applications Mingwei Samuel, Cong Yan, and Alvin Cheung SIGMOD'20 Demo
• Managing data constraints in database-backed web applications Junwen Yang, Utsav Sethi, Cong Yan, Alvin Cheung, and Shan Lu ICSE'20
• View-Driven Optimization of Database-Backed Web Applications Cong Yan, Alvin Cheung, Junwen Yang, and Shan Lu CIDR'20
• Generating Application-Specific Data Layouts for In-memory Databases Cong Yan and Alvin Cheung VLDB'19 [ source code ]
• View-Centric Performance Optimization for Database-Backed Web Applications Junwen Yang, Cong Yan, Chengcheng Wan, Shan Lu, and Alvin Cheung ICSE'19, Distinguished paper award [ Panorama website ] [ "The morning paper" blog ]
• PowerStation: Automatically detecting and fixing inefficiencies of database-backed web applications in IDE Junwen Yang, Cong Yan, Pranav Subramaniam, Shan Lu, and Alvin Cheung FSE'18 (demo) [ Download powerstation ]
• Synthesizing Type-Detection Logic for Rich Semantic Data Types Using Open-source Code Cong Yan and Yeye He SIGMOD'18
• How Not to Structure Your Database-backed Web Applications: A Study of Performance Bugs in The Wild Junwen Yang, Cong Yan, Pranav Subramaniam, Shan Lu, and Alvin Cheung ICSE'18 [ Hyperloop website ] [ "The morning paper" blog ]
• Understanding Performance Inefficiencies in Real-world Database-backed Applications Cong Yan, Junwen Yang, Alvin Cheung, and Shan Lu CIKM'17
• Leveraging Lock Contention to Improve OLTP Application Performance Cong Yan and Alvin Cheung VLDB'16 [ techreport | slides | QURO website ]
• Unlocking Ordered Parallelism with the Swarm Architecture Mark Jeffrey, Suvinay Subramanian, Cong Yan, Joel Emer, and Daniel Sanchez IEEE Micro's Top Picks from the Computer Architecture Conferences
• A Scalable Architecture for Ordered Parallelism Mark Jeffrey, Suvinay Subramanian, Cong Yan, Joel Emer, and Daniel Sanchez MICRO'15

Teaching

• TA for 6.172 System Performance Engineering
• TA for 6.033 Computer System Engineering

Program Committees

• 2025: SIGMOD
• 2024: SIGMOD, VLDB
• 2023: VLDB demo track
• 2022: SIGMOD industry track, VLDB demo track
• 2021: SIGMOD SRC, SIGIR, WSDM
• 2020: SIGIR
• 2018: CIKM (short paper), KAIS (journal reviewer)
• 2017: CIKM (short paper)