Making database systems usable

I attended the University at Buffalo Hacking event over the weekend. It was fun. There were 90+ projects, I judged 15 projects. There were some interesting talks as well. It was good to see youth energy. It feels good to teach next generation something.Another thing, GeoGuessr played as a group game under time pressure is a lot of fun. This may...

The chapter 9 of the Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA) book has the following 4 sections (which contain a total of 10 subsections). Consistency guaranteesLinearizabilityOrdering guaranteesDistributed transactions and consensusTMI (Too much info)The chapter tries to do too much. Almost an entire semester of distributed systems content...

This paper appeared in Sigmod'23.What?Auto-WLM is a machine learning based *automatic workload manager* currently used in production in Amazon Redshift.I thought this would be a machine learning paper, you know deep learning and stuff. But this paper turned out to be a practical/applied data systems paper. At its core, this paper is about...

This is a long chapter. It touches on so many things. Here is the table of contents.Faults and partial failuresUnreliable networksdetecting faultstimeouts and unbounded delayssync vs async networksUnreliable clocksmonotonic vs time-of-day clocksclock sync and accuracyrelying on sync clocksprocess pausesKnowledge truth and liestruth defined by...

We are continuing from the first part of our Chapter 7 review. Serializable isolation ensures that the final result of concurrent transactions is equivalent to if they had been run one at a time, without any concurrency. This eliminates any concurrency anomalies, since it ensures the transactions would behave as they would in a sequential...