The Geometry of SQL

Please see the bottom of this issue for a programming note! Correctness conditions constrain the sequences of events that are allowed to occur in a system like a database. If we observe this series of events: READ x -> 8 SET x = 3 READ x -> 8 READ x -> 3 We might say that consistency has been violated (it's important to remember: this is the...

It is CIDR time and that means there is a lot of out-there papers in the world of databases to look at. If you are not familiar, CIDR is the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research, which basically means it's a conference for academics to present their slightly goofier, slightly more esoteric, slightly more half-baked ideas. Sadly if you...

My roommate and I are in a war with UPS. I came home the other day to find she’d left this note on our front door: It would appear she also has some kind of additional beef with DHL ("an even more evil company than UPS"). I don’t know anything about that and I’m not getting involved. I think there’s some problem with the app that my landlord...

Ancestry I came across a cool algorithm recently for being able to efficiently answer ancestor queries in a tree ("is x an ancestor of y"). The trick is to assign to each node in the tree an interval [x, y] such that for any node, its children's ranges are contained within its range. It's easy to construct such ranges by doing a depth-first...

It’s a common pattern in Go to fan out I/O-bound tasks to a bunch of worker Goroutines. We have some big batch of work that has to get done, and we dole it out to workers that each do blocking I/O. There are a couple of natural ways to do this, but let's talk about a way not to do it first. I recently was shown a piece of code that implemented...