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Recent reads
Here are brief reviews for the 6 books I read in the last couple of months.How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (Jordan Ellenberg, 2014)This book discusses applying mathematical...
View ArticleDude, where's my Emacs?
It had been 3 years since I had to setup a new laptop. Past Murat had left me helpfulinstructions, but I got a bad surprise while configuring my Emacs setup. My beloved starter-kits, which worked...
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Oblivious Paxos: Privacy-Preserving Consensus Over Secret-Shares
This paper appeared in SOCC'23. The paper presents a primary-backup secret-shared state machine (PBSSM) architecture and the associated consensus protocol, Oblivious Paxos (OPaxos). OPaxos enables...
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Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What’s the BIG DEAL?
This paper is from Pat Helland, the apostate philosopher of database systems, overall a superb person, and a good friend of mine. The paper appeared this week at CIDR'24. (Check out the program for...
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Looking Back at Postgres
This is a 2019 article by Joe Hellerstein, the Jim Gray Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Last year at Sigmod, Joe was awarded the Ted Codd innovation award where he gave an awesome...
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Fault-Tolerant Replication with Pull-Based Consensus in MongoDB
This paper, from NSDI 2021, presents the design and implementation of strongly consistent replication in MongoDB using a consensus protocol derived from Raft.Raft provides fault-tolerant...
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Design and Analysis of a Logless Dynamic Reconfiguration Protocol
This paper appeared in OPODIS'21 and describes dynamic reconfiguration in MongoDB.So, what is dynamic reconfiguration? The core Raft protocol implements state machine replication (SMR) using a static...
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Tunable Consistency in MongoDB
This paper appeared in VLDB 2019. It discusses the tunable consistency models in MongoDB and how MongoDB's speculative execution model and data rollback protocol enable this spectrum of consistency...
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Verifying Transactional Consistency of MongoDB
This paper presents pseudocodes for the transaction protocols for the three possible MongoDB deployments: WiredTiger, ReplicaSet, and ShardedCluster, and shows that these satisfy different variants of...
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Transaction Processing Book, Gray/Reuter 1992
I started reading this book as part of Alex Petrov's book club.I am loving the book. We will do Chapter 3 soon, and I am late on reporting on this, but here are some material from the first chapters....
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Fault tolerance (Transaction processing book)
This is Chapter 3 from the Transaction Processing Book Gray/Reuter 1992.Why does the fault-tolerance discussion come so early in the book? We haven't even started talking about transactional...
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Adapting TPC-C Benchmark to Measure Performance of Multi-Document...
This paper appeared in VLDB 2019.Benchmarks are a necessary evil for database evaluation. Benchmarks often focus on narrow aspects and specific workloads, creating a misleading picture for broader...
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TLA+ modeling of MongoDB logless reconfiguration
Here we do a walkthrough of the TLA+ specs for the MongoDB logless reconfiguration protocol we have reviewed recently.The specs are available at the https://github.com/will62794/logless-reconfig repo...
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Recent reads (Feb 2024)
Here are the three books I have read recently. Argh, I wish I took some notes while going through these books. It feels hard to write these reviews in retrospect.The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly...
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Transaction models (Chapter 4. Transaction processing book)
Atomicity does not mean that something is executed as one instruction at the hardware level with some magic in the circuitry preventing it from being interrupted. Atomicity merely conveys the...
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Why I blog
My blog has been going for 14 years now, and has just passed 4 million pageviews. Yay! I remember the 1 million pageviews moment in 2017!The main reason I was able to persist for so long is because I...
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Transaction Processing Monitors (Chapter 5. Transaction processing book)
"Transaction Processing Monitors" is chapter 5 as part of our transaction processing book reading journey. This chapter had been the hardest to chapter to read and understand. It went into...
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Checking Causal Consistency of MongoDB
This paper declares the Jepsen testing of MongoDB for causal consistency a bit lacking in rigor, and goes on to test MongoDB against three variants of causal consistency (CC, CCv, and CM) under node...
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The demise of coding is greatly exaggerated
NVDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently made very contraversial remarks:"Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you that it is vital that your...
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Isolation Concepts (Chp 7: Transaction processing book)
Continuing with our Transaction book reading, this week we look at the first part of the Isolation concepts. The book gets conceptual to provide the theory behind isolation of transactions. Finally we...
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Isolation Concepts (Chp. 7, part 2, Transaction processing book)
Continuing with our Transaction Processing book reading, the second part of Chapter 7 covers degrees of isolation (and them co-existing), phantoms and predicate locks, how to implement predicate...
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Implementation of Cluster-wide Logical Clock and Causal Consistency in MongoDB
This paper (SIGMOD 2019) discusses the design of causal consistency and cluster-wide logical clock for MongoDB. Causal consistency preserves Lamport's happened-before (transitive and partial) order of...
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A critique of ANSI SQL Isolation layers (Transaction Processing Book followup)
This paper is from Sigmod 1995. As the title says, it critiques the ANSI SQL 92 standard (book) with respect to problems in isolation layer definitions. This is also a good follow up to the Transaction...
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Chardonnay: Fast and General Datacenter Transactions for On-Disk Databases...
This paper appeared in OSDI'23. I haven't read the paper, and I am going by the two presentations I have seen of the paper, and by a quick skim of the paper. The paper has a cool idea, and I decided I...
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OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There
This paper appeared in Sigmod 2008. The goal of the paper is to rethink the Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) database architecture (which remained largely unchanged from late 1970s) and to test out...
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