It looks like Active Disk Paxos includes essentially the paxos edit that CASPaxos proposed, and would probably get credit for it too if the paper wasn't so frustratingly difficult to work through.
I too understood what consensus is better by pondering exactly how/why ABD cannot support Compare-And-Swap operations. (And also after reading Murat's blogs.) I feel like a number of database/distsys concepts are easier to learn by looking instead at good examples of what they are not.
The Consensus@theconsensus.dev · 3d agoFrom Thomas's 1979 majority voting, to ABD's linearizable register, to Cassandra's read repair: we provide a runnable Python tour of quorum replication, and show how ABD does not solve consensus. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/08/02...
finally managed to finish a draft i started working on a month ago about Inkfuse, continuations and query execution paradigms deferworks.org/posts/inkfus...
Inkfuse, Continuations and Query Compilation | Opinions on Software.
Ramblings on databases, compilers and software matters.
deferworks.org
[arXiv] Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP arxiv.org/abs/2607.1... It's a DSQL paper, hot off the presses! Query processing in firecracker! Erasure coding on logs! The origin story of the turmoil crate! All cool stuff! Can't sneak an arXiv upload past me, Marc. :p
[VLDB '24] X-Stor: A Cloud-native NoSQL Database Service with Multi-model Support www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... Aside from the "everything can be implemented on top of a wide column store", there's a surprisingly detailed discussion of implementing modern multitenancy.
[ATC'22] DepFast: Orchestrating Code of Quorum Systems www.usenix.org/confe... Quorum objects make for clean code. I really appreciate these "how to write distsys code in more correct and manageable ways" papers.
[arXiv] Beyond Chunk-Then-Embed arxiv.org/abs/2602.1... I had assumed that, when chunking (large) documents for embedding, adding context about the document to the chunk would always be superior, and it was interesting to see that's not *always* the case.
[arXiv] Beyond Cosine Similarity arxiv.org/abs/2602.0... I almost always see cosine, and it was interesting to read about similarity metrics as classes of more and less restrictive similarity measures.
The TPC-H series taking a look at what each query is about is pretty good: www.database-doctor.com/tags/tpch
Today, we are going to talk about estimating filter selectivity and how to fail at it. Two queries are similar enough that we will analyse them together: Q12 and Q14.
database-doctor.com
In most languages, you hunt allocations down with a profiler and they creep back the moment you touch the hot path. Jane Street's superset of OCaml lets you flip that around: annotate a function with [@zero_alloc] and the compiler refuses to build if anything in its call tree touches the heap.
South Bay Systems returns for its June meetup on June 26th! We'll have two speakers: Yao Yue will talk about her experiences from working on Caching at Twitter and developing Pelikan, and Eric Liang will talk about Databrick's history-based data clustering feature. Register at luma.com/ogvfeacv
South Bay Systems: Caching & Clustering · Luma
Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you two wonderful talks: Yao Yue will speak about her experiences working on Caching…
luma.com
@jpountz.bsky.social from your thoughts on ACORN-1, I think you’d really like naviX of you haven’t seen it. Kuzu was doing a lot of cool stuff before acquisition 😢 www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/...
vldb.org
The recording from this event is now available! youtu.be/9LiSWbRASKc
Distributed Persistent Queues & MySQL Extensibility
YouTube video by South Bay Systems
youtu.be
Qian Li@qianli.dev · 3mo agoOur next @southbaysystems.xyz meetup is on May 26! We're covering one of my favorite topics: databases, and how to use them to make better architectural decisions and build reliable systems. Food and drinks will be provided courtesy of our hosts at PingCAP. Register here: luma.com/3j9twotu?tk=...
It appears there’s no sigmod programming contest for 2026? 16 year streak of cool projects ended. 😢
Our next @southbaysystems.xyz meetup is on May 26! We're covering one of my favorite topics: databases, and how to use them to make better architectural decisions and build reliable systems. Food and drinks will be provided courtesy of our hosts at PingCAP. Register here: luma.com/3j9twotu?tk=...
South Bay Systems: Queues & RDBMS Extensibility · Luma
Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you two wonderful talks: Himank Chaudhary will explain how the queuing infrastructure in…
luma.com
South Bay Systems returns for its April meetup on the 30th. This time we have @cliffclick.bsky.social giving a walkthrough of his teaching language for Sea of Nodes! Sign up now! luma.com/nnq9aq27
South Bay Systems: A Simple Guide to Sea of Nodes · Luma
Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we have our first compilers talk: a guided tour of Simple, a teaching language meant to showcase the…
luma.com
If you're an RSS user and a South Bay Systems attendee, I've added an RSS feed for the events at southbaysystems.xyz/...
I built a small interactive visualizer for Hybrid Logical Clocks (HLC). I used Claude Code to put this together quickly and make the behavior visible step by step. Try it here: muratdem.github.io/hlc-visualiz... Feedback welcome. Share if useful.
Hybrid Logical Clocks
Here I will write about our recent work on Hybrid Logical Clocks, which provides a feasible alternative to Google's TrueTime. A brief hist...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
Our next South Bay Systems meetup will be on March 31. We've got two awesome deep-dive talks from Sugu Sougoumarane (Consensus and Multigres) and @stuhood.sh (Full-Text Search and ParadeDB). Food and beverages will be provided, courtesy of our host, Snowflake. Register here: luma.com/2g3exvjw
South Bay Systems: Consensus & Full Text Search · Luma
Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you two wonderful talks: Sugu Sougoumarane will be speaking about deconstructing consensus…
luma.com
[CIDR '25] Linear Elastic Caching via Ski Rental www.vldb.org/cidrdb/... You should consider that holding a page in cache costs you, because RAM itself is expensive, and existing page replacement algorithms look at sizing cache independently (via miss-ratio curves).
[arXiv] Dynamic read & write optimization with TurtleKV arxiv.org/pdf/2509.1... TurtleKV shows a way to elastically move around the RUM conjecture space depending on what is important at the moment.
Vol:19 No:3 → Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems 👥 Authors: Xinjing Zhou, Viktor Leis, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker 📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p334-zhou.pdf
[VLDB '26] Garnet: A Next-Generation Cache-Store for Accelerating Applications and Services www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... It's fast, durable redis, brought to you by Badrish Chandramouli (et. al), known for other 🔥 work like FASTER and Bf-tree.
[CIDR '25] Adaptive Factorization Using Linear-Chained Hash Tables vldb.org/cidrdb/pape... Adaptive execution + factorization + WCOJ = great paper. The best intro to factorized databases I know of is www.youtube.com/watc....
[VLDB '25] MD-MVCC: Multi-version Concurrency Control for Schema Changes in Azure SQL Database www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... A great discussion of the end-to-end impact of allowing multiple versions of schema metadata information to be live concurrently, in a real, production system.
https://scour.ing/ has gotten pretty good at surfacing what new stuff I actually want to read on the internet, better than following subreddits. You can see my feed of mostly database things at scour.ing/@linearizable. It surfaces small personal blogs particularly well.
Scour
Scour interesting reads from noisy feeds you can't keep up with and smaller sites you didn't know to check.
scour.ing
The recording finally went great this time. I also demo'd doing a backup audio recording so that we can more reliably get a good recording to post, so hopefully the trend will continue 🤞
South Bay Systems@southbaysystems.xyz · 5mo agoThe recording from our last meetup is up! youtu.be/8j1Dqi2M_pI