As of 2026 I am a Member of Technical Staff at Materialize.
From 2022 to 2026 I was a Lead Member of Technical Staff working on on distributed databases at Salesforce. In particular I worked on: transaction processing, latency optimizations, RPC infrastructure, change data capture, database recovery.
In 2022 I defended my PhD from the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. I was advised by Khuzaima Daudjee and was a member of the Data Systems Group.
During my PhD my research interests lay in the intersection of distributed systems, databases, and machine learning. I was particularly interested in building adaptive and distributed data systems. My thesis was on the design and development of adaptive data storage and placement in distributed databases.
I received a Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Waterloo in 2016, with a focus on bioinformatics.
Projects
Physical Design within Distributed Data Systems: Modern data systems exist within a cluster of servers, with data distributed across the cluster. Therefore, how data is placed and accessed is critical to application performance. My research focuses on building adaptive data systems that make intelligent and dynamic physical design decisions improve performance. I have applied these techniques in distributed database systems (MorphoSys and DynaMast), HTAP databases (Proteus) and erasure coded storage systems (EC-Store).
Publications
2024
Caches Rule Replicate Everything Around MeMichael Abebe
High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS)
(Slides)
Caerus: Low-Latency Distributed Transactions for Geo-Replicated SystemsJoshua Hildred, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee Proceedings of the Very Large Databases Endowment (PVLDB)
2022
Adaptive Data Storage and Placement in Distributed Database SystemsMichael Abebe PhD Thesis (Slides)
Tiresias: Enabling Predictive Autonomous Storage and IndexingMichael Abebe, Horatiu Lazu, Khuzaima Daudjee Proceedings of the Very Large Databases Endowment (PVLDB) (Slides) (Talk) (Poster) (Poster Talk)
Proteus: Autonomous Adaptive Storage for Mixed WorkloadsMichael Abebe, Horatiu Lazu, Khuzaima Daudjee ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD) (Tech Report) (Slides) (Talk)
2020
MorphoSys: Automatic Physical Design Metamorphosis for Distributed Database SystemsMichael Abebe, Brad Glasbergen, Khuzaima Daudjee Proceedings of the Very Large Databases Endowment (PVLDB) (Tech Report) (Slides) (Talk)
DynaMast: Adaptive Dynamic Mastering for Replicated SystemsMichael Abebe, Brad Glasbergen, Khuzaima Daudjee IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) (Tech Report) (Slides) (Talk)
Sentinel: Universal Analysis and Insight for Data Systems Brad Glasbergen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee, Amit Levi Proceedings of the Very Large Databases Endowment (PVLDB) (Tech Report)
ChronoCache: Predictive and Adaptive Mid-Tier Query Result CachingBrad Glasbergen, Kyle Langendoen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD)
Demo: Sentinel: Understanding Data SystemsBrad Glasbergen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee, Daniel Vogel, Jian Zhao ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD) Demo Track (Demo video) BEST DEMO WINNER!
2019
WatDFS: A Project for Understanding Distributed Systems in the Undergraduate CurriculumMichael Abebe, Brad Glasbergen, Khuzaima Daudjee ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) (Slides)
2018
EC-Store: Bridging the Gap Between Storage and Latency in Distributed Erasure Coded SystemsMichael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee, Brad Glasbergen, Yuanfeng Tian International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) (Slides)
Tutorial: Adaptive Replication and Partitioning in Data Systems Brad Glasbergen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference (Middleware) (Slides)
Apollo: Learning Query Correlations for Predictive Caching in Geo-Distributed SystemsBrad Glasbergen, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee, Scott Foggo and Anil Pacaci Extending Database Technology (EDBT)
2017
Diversity-generating retroelements: natural variation, classification and evolution inferred from a large-scale genomic surveyLi Wu, Mari Gingery, Michael Abebe, Diego Arambula, Elizabeth Czornyj, Sumit Handa, Hamza Khan, Mingshun Liu, Mechthild Pohlschroder, Kharissa L. Shaw, Amy Du, Huatao Guo, Partho Ghosh, Jeff F. Miller and Steven Zimmerly Nucleic Acids Research
2013
A pipeline of programs for collecting and analyzing group II intron retroelement sequences from GenBankMichael Abebe, Manuel A Candales, Adrian Duong, Keyar S Hood, Tony Li, Ryan A E Neufeld, Abat Shakenov, Runda Sun, Li Wu, Ashley M Jarding, Cameron Semper and Steven Zimmerly Mobile DNA
Experience
Salesforce
I was a Researcher and Lead Member of Technical Staff at Salesforce. I researched, designed and implemented techniques to improve the performance, scalability and efficiency of Salesforce's distributed database. I worked on: transaction processing, latency optimizations, RPC infrastructure, change data capture, database recovery.
As an example of this work, I have two patents: on deterministic testing and a latency optimization to read your own uncommitted writes.
I also received the Technology All Star Award (awarded to less than 1% of engineers) for my work.
I worked on two different infrastructure teams during my internships (2015) at Facebook.
On the Data Infrastructure team I worked on the next generation data warehouse system. I helped improve operational workflows by building a custom log search tool for distributed debugging. I additionally worked on a shared memory file transfer between the client interface and the storage interface.
On the Service Infrastructure team I worked on service discovery and the internal ZooKeeper system. My work focused on moving service discovery from a daemon process to a service itself. In the process I modified the Thrift compiler to provide transport level request caching.
Palantir
As a Software Engineering Intern (2014) at Palantir I prototyped a web application that allowed users to collaborate during investigations within the Palantir web applications. The application allowed users to directly share the state of their investigations as a first class citizen. I also worked on the maps application within Palantir.
Service
Program Committee Member
ICDE (2025-2026), SIGMOD (2026), VLDB (2022-2024)
External Reviewer
VLDBJ (2023), VLDB (2017-2022), SIGMOD (2018-2021), TKDE (2021), ICDE (2017-2020), Middleware (2017)
Awards
I received the Technology All Star Award at Salesforce for my work.
I was awarded the Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award for my thesis.
I was named a Distinguished Reviewer at VLDB 2023.
I was previously supported by a NSERC CGS-D scholarship and a Facebook Emerging Scholar award.
Teaching
I was a TA for CS 454 (Distributed Systems) in the winter of 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and the summer of 2018. In these offerings I gave guest lectures on erasure coded storage systems. I also helped develop a new assignment on distributed file systems, which is described in our WatDFS SIGCSE paper.
Contact
Email: mtabebe@uwaterloo.ca
GitHub: @mtabebe