Declarative recursive computation on an RDBMS

Declarative recursive computation on an RDBMS... or, why you should use a database for distributed machine learing Jankov et al., VLDB'19 If you think about a system like Procella that’s combining transactional and analytic workloads on top of a cloud-native architecture, extensions to SQL for streaming, dataflow based materialized views (see e.g. Naiad, Noria, Multiverses, ... Continue Reading

Experiences with approximating queries in Microsoft’s production big-data clusters

Experiences with approximating queries in Microsoft’s production big-data clusters Kandula et al., VLDB'19 I’ve been excited about the potential for approximate query processing in analytic clusters for some time, and this paper describes its use at scale in production. Microsoft’s big data clusters have 10s of thousands of machines, and are used by thousands of ... Continue Reading

DDSketch: a fast and fully-mergeable quantile sketch with relative-error guarantees

DDSketch: a fast and fully-mergeable quantile sketch with relative-error guarantees Masson et al., VLDB'19 Datadog handles a ton of metrics - some customers have endpoints generating over 10M points per second! For response times (latencies) reporting a simple metric such as ‘average’ is next to useless. Instead we want to understand what’s happening at different ... Continue Reading

SLOG: serializable, low-latency, geo-replicated transactions

SLOG: serializable, low-latency, geo-replicated transactions Ren et al., VLDB'19 SLOG is another research system motivated by the needs of the application developer (aka, user!). Building correct applications is much easier when the system provides strict serializability guarantees. Strict serializability reduces application code complexity and bugs, since it behaves like a system that is running on ... Continue Reading

IPA: invariant-preserving applications for weakly consistent replicated databases

IPA: invariant-preserving applications for weakly consistent replicated databases Balegas et al., VLDB'19 IPA for developers, happy days! Last we week looked at automating checks for invariant confluence, and extending the set of cases where we can show that an object is indeed invariant confluent. I’m not going to re-cover that background in this write-up, so ... Continue Reading