Use of Time in Distributed Databases (part 2): Use of logical clocks in databases

This concludes our series on the use of time in distributed databases, where we explored how use of time in distributed systems evolved from a simple ordering mechanism to a sophisticated tool for coordination and performance optimization.A key takeaway is that time serves as a shared reference frame that enables nodes to make consistent...

This is part 4 of our "Use of Time in Distributed Databases" series. In this post, we explore how synchronized physical clocks enhance production database systems.SpannerGoogle's Spanner (OSDI'12) implemented a novel approach to handling time in distributed database systems through its TrueTime API. TrueTime API provides time as an interval that...

I recently came across the Occult paper (NSDI'17) during my series on "The Use of Time in Distributed Databases." I had high expectations, but my in-depth reading surfaced significant concerns about its contributions and claims. Let me share my analysis, as there are still many valuable lessons to learn from Occult about causality maintenance and...

This is part 3 of our "Use of Time in Distributed Databases" series. In this post, we explore how synchronized physical clocks enhance database systems, focusing on research and prototype databases. Discussion of time's role in production databases will follow in our next post.To begin, let's revisit the utility of synchronized clocks in...

Distributed systems are characterized by nodes executing concurrently with no shared state and no common clock. Coordination between nodes are needed to satisfy some correctness properties, but since coordination requires message communication there is a performance tradeoff preventing nodes from frequently communicating/coordinating.Timestamping...