A friend asked me for a few pointers to interesting, mostly recent papers on data warehousing and "big data" database systems, with an eye towards real-world deployments. I figured I'd share the list. While it's biased and rather incomplete but maybe of interest to someone. While many are obvious choices (I've omitted several, like MapReduce), I think there are a few underappreciated gems.
###Dataflow Engines:
Dryad--general-purpose distributed parallel dataflow engine
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryad/eurosys07.pdf
Spark--in memory dataflow
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~matei/papers/2012/nsdi_spark.pdf