Biography
I am a software engineer working on core database engine development at Salesforce, with a focus on:
Cloud-native, distributed OLTP systems: transaction processing, asynchronous networking, replication, fault tolerance, as well as observability and production rollout for large-scale production databases.
AI agents for database infrastructure: build AI agents for feature rollout, incident diagnosis, and operational automation.
I am particularly interested in the intersection of database systems, distributed systems, and AI-native infrastructure. I also have a strong personal interest in AI for healthcare.
I approach system building with a strong sense of pragmatism, caring deeply about production impact & quality, and the people who build, operate, and rely on these systems. I value structured thinking when navigating complex design spaces, and I am motivated by building systems that are not only correct and scalable, but also usable and humane.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I worked with Prof. Xiangyao Yu. My research focused on transaction processing and cloud-native databases, with publications at SIGMOD, VLDB, and FAST. I was a recipient of the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship. Before 2020, I was advised by Prof. Theodoros Rekatsinas in my first year of PhD working on ML-driven data integration and data cleaning.
Latest
[Dec. 2023] Joined Salesforce, working on core database engine development for a cloud-native distributed OLTP system.
[Sep. 2022] 🔥 Cornus, optimized two-phase commit for Cloud OLTP, has been accepted to VLDB 2022 (presented in 2023)!
[Mar. 2022] How Good is My HTAP System, has been accepted to SIGMOD 2022!
[Oct. 2021] 🔥 Awarded the 2021-2022 Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship (US & Canada)!
[Mar. 2021] 🔥 Bamboo, optimized two-phase locking for high contention, has been accepted to SIGMOD 2021!
[Dec. 2020] Non-Hierarchical Caching, a generic method to optimize caching for Persistent Memory hierarchies, has been accepted to FAST 2021!
Publications
Cornus: Atomic Commit for Cloud DBMS with Storage Disaggregation
Zhihan Guo, Xinyu Zeng, Kan Wu, Wuh-Chwen Hwang, Ziwei Ren, Xiangyao Yu, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Philip A. Bernstein
VLDB’2022 [paper] [extended version]
How Good is My HTAP System?
Elena Milkai, Yannis Chronis, Kevin Gaffney, Zhihan Guo, Jignesh Patel, Xiangyao Yu
SIGMOD’2022
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’2021 [paper] [extended version]
The Storage Hierarchy is Not a Hierarchy: Optimizing Caching on Modern Storage Devices with Orthus
Kan Wu, Zhihan Guo, Guanzhou Hu, Kaiwei Tu, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Rathijit Sen, Kwanghyun Park, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
FAST’2021 [paper]
The Storage Hierarchy is Not a Hierarchy: Optimizing Caching on Modern Storage Devices with Orthus
Kan Wu, Zhihan Guo, Guanzhou Hu, Kaiwei Tu, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Rathijit Sen, Kwanghyun Park, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau
NVMW’2021 [paper]
A Statistical Perspective on Discovering Functional Dependencies in Noisy Data
Yunjia Zhang, Zhihan Guo and Theodoros Rekatsinas
SIGMOD’2020 [paper] [code]
Unsupervised Functional Dependency Discovery for Data Preparation
Zhihan Guo and Theodoros Rekatsinas
ICLR’2019, Learning from Limited Data Workshop [paper] [extended version] [poster]
Data profiling methods for interactive data cleaning
Zhihan Guo and Theodoros Rekatsinas
MMLS’2018
Research & Work Experience
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Salesforce, SDB, in San Francisco, CA
2023.12 - present
Research Assistant
UW-Madison Database Group in Madison, WI
2018.02 - 2023.12
Software Engineer Intern
Amazon, Redshift, in East Palo Alto, CA
2022.06 - 2022.09
Affiliate Research Assistant
Microsoft Research GSL in Madison, WI
2021.08 - 2022.06
Software Engineer Intern in System & Infrastructure
Facebook, Delos Team, in Seattle, WA
Summer 2021
Research Assistant
UW-Madison HCI Group in Madison, WI
2017.02 - 2018.05
Research Assistant
Center for Healthy Minds in Madison, WI
2017.01 - 2017.09
Research Assistant
Child Emotion Lab @ Waisman Center in Madison, WI
2016.01 - 2017.09
Teaching
Teaching Assistant for CS564 Database Management Systems, Fall 2019