transactional.blog

A NULL BITMAP guest post on loop parallelism transformations.

SIGMOD hosts a yearly competition to design a system which performs a set of queries as quickly as possible. The contests provide a starting framework and test harness. They make great intermediate database projects for learning.

Requirements and design constraints for a implementing SQL on a (distributed) key-value store, with commentary on tradeoffs therein.

Every transactional system must execute, order, validate, and persist transactions.

There's better ways to replicate data than Raft.

Notes on SQLite (and Limbo) internals.

Aurora, Socrates, PolarDB, and Taurus.

Suggested reading material for various topics.

An overview of erasure coding, its trade-offs, and applications in distributed storage systems.

Consistent replication algorithms can be placed on a sliding scale based on how they handle replica failures. Across the three common points on this spectrum, the resource efficiency, availability, and latency are compared, providing guidance for how to choose an appropriate replication algorithm for a use case.

A B-Tree tutorial series implementing an ABI-compatible BerkeleyDB clone.

FoundationDB’s use of SQLite’s btree as its own storage engine should not be used to support claims that SQLite has a high quality and performant storage implementation.

A reminder that macOS does not respect the usual ways of making data durable on disk.

A walkthrough of how and why complex infrastructure should be built with deterministic simulation, and how to make such tests as productive as possible for developers.

Databases run on real machines, and aspects of those machines will affect the operation of the database. If a database has a better understanding of the machine it is being run on, it can both leverage that for increased performance and caution operators about potential dangers.

An inventory of the frameworks and libraries to use when writing a network service in C++.

The Network Time Protocol is the most available and widely-used time synchronization protocol, but is claimed to offer the worst maximum clock error.