transactional.blog

Suggested reading material for various topics.

SIGMOD hosts a yearly competition to design a system which performs a set of queries as quickly as possible. The contests provide a starting framework and test harness. They make great intermediate database projects for learning.

An overview of erasure coding, its trade-offs, and applications in distributed storage systems.

Consistent replication algorithms can be placed on a sliding scale based on how they handle replica failures. Across the three common points on this spectrum, the resource efficiency, availability, and latency are compared, providing guidance for how to choose an appropriate replication algorithm for a use case.

A B-Tree tutorial series implementing an ABI-compatible BerkeleyDB clone.

A reminder that macOS does not respect the usual ways of making data durable on disk.

A walkthrough of how and why complex infrastructure should be built with deterministic simulation, and how to make such tests as productive as possible for developers.