Datastores

Databases of all shapes and sizes.

Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
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

JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 10 Comments
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

Automatic database management system tuning through large-scale machine learning

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
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

Do we need specialized graph databases? Benchmarking real-time social networking applications

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments
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

Spanner: becoming a SQL system

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments
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

vCorfu: A cloud-scale object store on a shared log

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
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

Chronix: Long term storage and retrieval technology for anomaly detection in operational data

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Chronix: Long term storage and retrieval technology for anomaly detection in operational data Lautenschlager et al., FAST 2017 Chronix (http://www.chronix.io/ ) is a time-series database optimised to support anomaly detection. It supports a multi-dimensional generic time series data model and has built-in high level functions for time series operations. Chronix also a scheme called "Date-Delta-Compaction" (DDC) ... Continue Reading