Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation, Crooks et al., PODC’17. Last week we looked at Elle, which detects isolation anomalies by setting things up so that the inner workings of the database, in the form of the direct serialization graph (DSG), can be externally recovered. Today’s paper choice, ‘Seeing is believing’ also ... Continue Reading

Helios: hyperscale indexing for the cloud & edge, Potharaju et al., PVLDB'20 On the surface this is a paper about fast data ingestion from high-volume streams, with indexing to support efficient querying. As a production system within Microsoft capturing around a quadrillion events and indexing 16 trillion search keys per day it would be interesting ... Continue Reading

Building an elastic query engine on disaggregated storage, Vuppalapati, NSDI'20 This paper describes the design decisions behind the Snowflake cloud-based data warehouse. As the saying goes, 'all snowflakes are special' - but what is it exactly that's special about this one? When I think about cloud-native architectures, I think about disaggregation (enabling each resource type ... Continue Reading

Narrowing the gap between serverless and its state with storage functions, Zhang et al., SoCC'19 "Narrowing the gap" was runner-up in the SoCC'19 best paper awards. While being motivated by serverless use cases, there's nothing especially serverless about the key-value store, Shredder, this paper reports on. Shredder's novelty lies in a new implementation of an ... Continue Reading

Benchmarking spreadsheet systems Rahman et al., Preprint A recent [tweet thread from Aditya Parameswaran]TwThread drew my attention to this pre-print paper. When spreadsheets were originally conceived, data and formula were input by hand and so everything operated at human scale. Increasingly we’re dealing with larger and larger datasets — for example, data imported via csv ... Continue Reading

We’ve been covering papers from VLDB 2019 for the last three weeks, and next week it will be time to mix things up again. There were so many interesting papers at the conference this year though that I haven’t been able to cover nearly as many as I would like. So today’s post is a ... Continue Reading

Updating graph databases with Cypher Green et al., VLDB'19 This is the story of a great collaboration between academia, industry, and users of the Cypher graph querying language as created by Neo4j. Beyond Neo4j, Cypher is also supported in SAP HANA Graph, RedisGraph, Agnes Graph, and Memgraph. Cypher for Apache Spark, and Cypher over Gremlin ... Continue Reading