Rimma Nehme

CEO

Seattle, Washington, United States20 yrs 9 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchAI Enabled

Key Highlights

Expert in building scalable AI infrastructure.
Founder of PolyBase technology for SQL Server.
Led development of Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS Architect with deep expertise in AI and database systems.

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Skills

Core Skills

Ai InfrastructureDistributed SystemsDatabase SystemsSql ServerData Processing

Other Skills

multi-tenant servicecomputenetworkingstorageSQL Server PDW Query OptimizerSQL Server Live Query StatisticsAutomated Physical DesignPolyBase technologyHadoopquery processingPartial Results for Database Systemsdata warehousingQuery Progress IndicatorsSoftware EngineeringDatabases

About

I am building a highly scalable, performant, robust, and cost-effective AI infrastructure, purpose-built for high-scale AI workloads (e.g., large-scale PyTorch and TensorFlow training jobs and inferencing models). My background is in distributed systems, OS, AI systems, hardware (GPUs/FPGAs) and internals of Azure. In my free time, I am also writing code (smart contracts) in Ethereum Blockchain using Solidity, Web3.JS, Truffle, Metamask, Remix and other Blockchain technologies. Pior to that, I was a part of Cosmos DB - Microsoft's globally distributed database service, where we've built the globally distributed database service and helped customers from all over the world to onboard their apps on Cosmos DB. Today, Cosmos DB - one of the fastest growing services on Azure, running across 60+ regions worldwide. I like to build differentiated products using the latest technology.

Experience

Microsoft

10 roles

Partner Architect, New Project

Feb 2022 – Present · 4 yrs 1 mo

Partner Architect, Singularity

Promoted

Oct 2019 – Feb 2022 · 2 yrs 4 mos

I was one of the founders of Singularity service, which is a globally distributed, multi-tenant service that provides robust, cost-effective and competitive AI infrastructure (compute, networking and storage) for AI training and inferencing. Read more about it here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07848

AI infrastructuredistributed systemsmulti-tenant servicecomputenetworkingstorage

Product Manager & Architect | Cosmos DB

Feb 2018 – Sep 2019 · 1 yr 7 mos

Group Product Manager | Cosmos DB and HDInsight

Oct 2017 – Feb 2018 · 4 mos

Group Product Manager | Architect - Cosmos DB

Jun 2017 – Oct 2017 · 4 mos

Architect | Cosmos DB

Feb 2017 – Jun 2017 · 4 mos

An architect in Azure Cosmos DB team. Azure Cosmos DB is the first globally distributed, multi-model database service for building planet scale apps. Azure Cosmos DB is first globally distributed, multi-model database system. The service is designed to allow customers to elastically and horizontally scale both throughput and storage across any number of geographical regions, it offers guaranteed <10 ms latencies at the 99th percentile, 99.99% high availability and well defined consistency models to developers. Cosmos DB is the first globally distributed database service in the market today to offer comprehensive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for throughput, latency, availability and consistency.

Technical Adviser to CVP Data Group at Microsoft

Apr 2016 – Feb 2017 · 10 mos

I was a TA to the Office of Corporate Vice President of Data Group at Microsoft covering Data and Analytics, Information Management and Machine Learning and Data Platform products and cloud services. The group is responsible for SQL Server, SQL DB, Azure DocumentDB (NoSQL), SQL Data Warehouse, Cortana Initelligence , HDInsight (Hadoop), Data Lake, Stream Analytics, Data Factory and Machine Learning.

Principal Software Engineer

Aug 2014 – Apr 2016 · 1 yr 8 mos

Worked on several of Microsoft’s key database products and technologies. My personal technology contributions include SQL Server PDW Query Optimizer, SQL Server Live Query Statistics, Automated Physical Design for Parallel Database Systems and Partial Results for Database Systems. I was also one of the original founders of the PolyBase technology in SQL Server and SQLDW.

Senior Research Engineer

Promoted

Mar 2013 – Aug 2014 · 1 yr 5 mos

Some of the projects I've worked on in this position include:
I was the founder of PolyBase technology – a technology that integrates Microsoft’s relational products, SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) and SQL Server with Hadoop through a split query processing paradigm (I got to name the project "PolyBase" too) - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/solutions-technologies/data-warehousing/polybase.aspx
Partial Results for Database Systems - a framework that produces partial results to SQL queries even when some input data sources are unavailable and gives certain guarantees about these results in terms of correctness and completeness.

SQL Server PDW Query OptimizerSQL Server Live Query StatisticsAutomated Physical DesignPolyBase technologyDatabase SystemsSQL Server

Research Software Engineer

Jun 2009 – Mar 2013 · 3 yrs 9 mos

In this position my contributions include:
SQL Server PDW Query Optimizer – a 2-phase parallel query optimizer for the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse.
Query Progress Indicators for SQL Server SMP and MPP systems - a system that is intended to inform the user that a SQL query is in progress, to reassure that the system is not hung or waiting for user input, and to provide the user with an estimate of how far through a query/operator the system has progressed. This work eventually contributed to the implementation of the SQL Server Live Statistics feature.
Automated Physical Design for Parallel Database Systems - a "partitioning advisor" that recommends the best partitioning design for an expected workload on a parallel database system. This advisor recommends which tables should be replicated (copied into every compute node) and which ones should be distributed according to specific column(s) so that the cost of
evaluating similar workloads is minimized.

PolyBase technologyPartial Results for Database SystemsDatabase SystemsData Processing

Microsoft

3 roles

Researcher

Promoted

May 2008 – Aug 2008 · 3 mos · Redmond, WA

Implemented a system, called Mini-Me, designed to ease and speed-up the task of finding min-repros in database-related products. Mini-Me employs several effective tools, including: the novel simplification transformations, the high-level language for creating search scripts and automation, the "record-and-replay" functionality, and the visualization of the search space and results. In addition to the standard application mode, the system can be interacted with in the game mode. Potentially, a system like Mini-Me can save hours of time (for both customers and testers to isolate a problem), which could result in faster fixes and large cost savings to organizations.
The paper on Mini-Me won the Best Paper award in the DBTest workshop (in conjunction with SIGMOD) in 2009.
Min-Repros in database software - http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=115252

SQL Server PDW Query OptimizerAutomated Physical DesignQuery Progress IndicatorsDatabase SystemsSQL Server

Researcher

May 2007 – Aug 2007 · 3 mos · Redmond, WA

Implemented a novel approach called "Configuration-Parametric Query Optimization" that drastically improves the performance of current tuning tools for database management systems (30-450x improvement). By issuing a single optimization call per query, we are able to generate a compact representation of the optimization space that can then produce efficiently execution plans for the input query under arbitrary configurations. Our experiments showed that our proposed technique speeds up query optimization by 30x to over 450x with virtually no loss in quality, and effectively eliminates the optimization bottleneck in existing tuning tools.
AutoAdmin - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/autoadmin/

Researcher

Jun 2006 – Sep 2006 · 3 mos · Redmond, WA

Worked on Immortal DB project. This project's goal was to provide the infrastructure for saving and indexing all prior states of a database. We have built a prototype system that included indexing, version compression, and bad user transaction recovery. A major goal was to achieve performance close to that of an unversioned database. My personal contribution was the implementation of a data compression scheme in the temporal index (TSB-tree). The compression substantially reduced the storage needed for preserving historical data. For efficiency, all compression and decompression were local to a page.
(ImmortalDB - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/immortaldb/)
Publication:
David Lomet, Mingsheng Hong, Rimma Nehme, and Rui Zhang, Transaction Time Indexing with Version Compression, in VLDB Conference, Very Large Data Bases Endowment Inc., August 2008

Emc

2 roles

Software Engineer

Jan 2000 – Jan 2003 · 3 yrs · Hopkinton, MA

Developed online configuration management API's (subset of SYMAPI) for enterprise-level storage systems (Symmetrix, Clarion). SYMAPI library functions use system calls to generate low-level control commands to Symmetrix storage arrays. Users can select objects (devices) and actions which are passed to the SYMAPI, allowing easy storage array management without taking it offline.

Software Engineer

May 1999 – Aug 1999 · 3 mos · Hopkinton, MA

Worked on testing the EMC Solutions Enabler (known as SYMCLI and SYMAPI) which is a specialized library or set of UNIX-formatted commands. The SYMCLI (Symmetrix command line interface) is used to monitor and perform control operations on devices and data objects for the management of information storage complex. It also monitors Symmetrix device configuration and the status of devices that comprise the storage environment. The target storage environments managed by SYMCLI are typically Symmetrix-based but can be CLARiiON-based storage arrays.