Paper
In MemSQL Architecture we learned one of the core strategies MemSQL uses to achieve their need for speed is lock-free skip lists. Skip lists are used to efficiently handle range queries. Making the skip-lists lock-free helps eliminate contention and make writes fast. If this all sounds a little pie-in-the-sky then
Paper
If you stayed up all night watching the life reaffirming Curiosity landing on Mars, then this paper, High-Performance Concurrency Control Mechanisms for Main-Memory Databases, has nothing to do with that at all, but it is an excellent look at how to use optimistic MVCC schemes to reduce lock overhead on
Paper
Neil Conway from Berkeley CS is giving an advanced level talk at a meetup today in San Francisco on a new paper: Logic and Lattices for Distributed Programming - extending set logic to support CRDT-style lattices. The description of the meetup is probably the clearest introduction to the paper: In
Paper
In his blog post, Scaling WSO2 Stratos, Srinath Perera explains the scaling architecture of the WSO2 Stratos Platform as a Service (PaaS) infrastructure. It is explained as a series of solutions where every solution adds a new concept to solve a specific problem found in the earlier solution. Overall, WSO2
Paper
If you are a normal human being and find the Paxos protocol confusing, then this paper, Paxos Made Moderately Complex, is a great find. Robbert van Renesse from Cornell University has written a clear and well written paper with excellent explanations. The Abstract: For anybody who has ever tried to
Paper
Here's a really good article in the Communications of the ACM on reducing network packet processing overhead by redesigning the network stack: Revisiting Network I/O APIs: The Netmap Framework by Luigi Rizzo. As commodity networking performance increases operating systems need to keep up or all those CPUs
Strategy
The argument for a massively multicore future is now familiar: while clock speeds have leveled off, device density is increasing, so the future is cheap chips with hundreds and thousands of cores. That’s the inexorable logic behind our multicore future. The unsolved question that lurks deep in the dark
Example
“Data is everywhere, never be at a single location. Not scalable, not maintainable.” –Alex Szalay While Galileo played life and death doctrinal games over the mysteries revealed by the telescope, another revolution went unnoticed, the microscope gave up mystery after mystery and nobody yet understood how subversive would be what
Paper
MoreSQL is a cheeky idea Alex Tatiyants invented in NoSQL No More: Let’s double down with MoreSQL advocating that the cure for NoSQL is not less SQL, but even more SQL. Use SQL everywhere, for everything. This is of course creates yet another NewSQL. Hopefully we've exhausted
Linux
You program in a dynamic language, that runs on a JVM, that runs on a OS designed 40 years ago for a completely different purpose, that runs on virtualized hardware. Does this make sense? We've talked about this idea before in Machine VM + Cloud API - Rewriting The
Strategy
How do you scale an inbox that has multiple highly volatile feeds? That's a problem faced by social networks like Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. Follow a few hundred event sources and it's hard to scalably order an inbox so that you see a correct view as
Paper
Teams from Princeton and CMU are working together to solve one of the most difficult problems in the repertoire: scalable geo-distributed data stores. Major companies like Google and Facebook have been working on multiple datacenter database functionality for some time, but there's still a general lack of available