Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation Crooks et al., PODC’17 This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of isolation levels, a topic we’ve looked at before and which contains quite a bit of complexity. The gold standard reference for understanding isolation is Adya’s Generalized isolation level definitions. Unlike the definitions … Continue reading Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation
Tag: Datastores
Databases of all shapes and sizes.
JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores
JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores Zhang & Stutsman, HotCloud'17 Last year we looked at RAMCloud, an ultra-low latency key-value store combining DRAM and RDMA. (Also check out the team's work on patterns for writing distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant code and how to support linearizable multi-object transactions on RAMCloud with RIFL). Now the RAMCloud research … Continue reading JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores
Automatic database management system tuning through large-scale machine learning
Automatic database management system tuning through large-scale machine learning Aken et al. , SIGMOD'17 Achieving good performance in DBMSs is non-trivial as they are complex systems with many tunable options that control nearly all aspects of their runtime operation. OtterTune uses machine learning informed by data gathered from previous tuning sessions to tune new DBMS … Continue reading Automatic database management system tuning through large-scale machine learning
Do we need specialized graph databases? Benchmarking real-time social networking applications
Do we need specialized graph databases? Benchmarking real-time social networking applications Pacaci et al., GRADES'17 Today's paper comes from the GRADES workshop co-located with SIGMOD. The authors take an established graph data management system benchmark suite (LDBC) and run it across a variety of graph and relational stores. The findings make for very interesting reading, … Continue reading Do we need specialized graph databases? Benchmarking real-time social networking applications
Using word embedding to enable semantic queries on relational databases
Using word embedding to enable semantic queries in relational databases Bordawekar and Shmeuli, DEEM'17 As I'm sure some of you have figured out, I've started to work through a collection of papers from SIGMOD'17. Strictly speaking, this paper comes from the DEEM workshop held in conjunction with SIGMOD, but it sparked my imagination and I … Continue reading Using word embedding to enable semantic queries on relational databases
Spanner: becoming a SQL system
Spanner: becoming a SQL system Bacon et al., SIGMOD'17 This week we'll start digging into some of the papers from SIGMOD'17. First up is a terrific 'update' paper on Google's Spanner which brings the story up to date in the five years since the original OSDI'12 paper. ... in many ways, today's Spanner is very … Continue reading Spanner: becoming a SQL system
SoK: Cryptographically protected database search
SoK: Cryptographically proctected database search Fuller et al., IEEE Security and Privacy 2017 This is a survey paper (Systematization of Knowledge, SoK) reviewing the current state of protected database search (encrypted databases). As such, it packs a lot of information into a relatively small space. As we've seen before, there are a wide-variety of cryptographic … Continue reading SoK: Cryptographically protected database search
Why your encrypted database is not secure
Why your encrypted database is not secure Grubbs et al., HotOS'17 This is the third paper we've looked at so far in The Morning Paper on the topic of encrypted databases. The clear takeaway for me is that practical, provable security guarantees are very hard to deliver! Don't confuse better protection with unbreakable protection, and … Continue reading Why your encrypted database is not secure
vCorfu: A cloud-scale object store on a shared log
vCorfu: A cloud-scale object store on a shared log Wei et al., NSDI'17 vCorfu builds on the idea of a distributed shared log that we looked at yesterday with CORFU, to construct a distributed object store. We show that vCorfu outperforms Cassandra, a popular state-of-the-art NoSQL store, while providing strong consistency (opacity, read-own-writes), efficient transactions, … Continue reading vCorfu: A cloud-scale object store on a shared log
Enlightening the I/O path: A holistic approach for application performance
Enlightening the I/O Path: A holistic approach for application performance Kim et al., FAST '17 Lots of applications contain a mix of foreground and background tasks. Since we're at the file system level here, for application, think Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL and so on. Typically user requests are considered foreground tasks, and tasks such as housekeeping, … Continue reading Enlightening the I/O path: A holistic approach for application performance
the morning paper 