Month: September 2018

Columnstore and B+ tree – are hybrid physical designs important?

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 12 Comments
Columnstore and B+ tree - are hybrid physical designs important? Dziedzic et al., SIGMOD'18 Earlier this week we looked at the design of column stores and their advantages for analytic workloads. What should you do though if you have a mixed workload including transaction processing, decision support, and operational analytics? Microsoft SQL Server supports hybrid ... Continue Reading

The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments
The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems Abadi et al., Foundations and trends in databases, 2012 I came here by following the references in the Smoke paper we looked at earlier this week. "The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems" is a longer piece at 87 pages, but it’s good value-for-time. ... Continue Reading

Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 9 Comments
Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks Battaglia et al., arXiv'18 Earlier this week we saw the argument that causal reasoning (where most of the interesting questions lie!) requires more than just associational machine learning. Structural causal models have at their core a graph of entities and relationships between them. Today we’ll be looking ... Continue Reading

NAVEX: Precise and scalable exploit generation for dynamic web applications

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 10 Comments
NAVEX: Precise and scalable exploit generation for dynamic web applications Alhuzali et al., USENIX Security 2018 NAVEX (https://github.com/aalhuz/navex) is a very powerful tool for finding executable exploits in dynamic web applications. It combines static and dynamic analysis (to cope with dynamically generated web content) to find vulnerable points in web applications, determine whether inputs to ... Continue Reading

Unveiling and quantifying Facebook exploitation of sensitive personal data for advertising purposes

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Unveiling and quantifying Facebook exploitation of sensitive personal data for advertising purposes Cabañas et al., USENIX Security 2018 Earlier this week we saw how the determined can still bypass most browser and tracker-blocking extension protections to track users around the web. Today’s paper is a great example of why you should care about that. Cabañas ... Continue Reading