Where to Apply for a PhD in Database Systems in the US (2016)
Andy provides a list of his favorite database researchers in the US as a guide for students applying to graduate school.
October 03, 2016
August 03, 2016
Chasing the Dragon of OLTP Databases
Andy comes clean and talks about overcoming his database performance addiction problem.
July 26, 2016
My Favorite Database Shirts
Andy reviews his favorite NoSQL and NewSQL database shirts.
July 05, 2016
The Carnegie Mellon Database Application Catalog
Andy announces a new on-line repository of ready-to-run database applications.
June 08, 2016
Distributed Transactions in Vitess
With Vitess introducing sharding and allowing you to create cross-shard indexes, distributed transactions become unavoidable for certain workloads. Currently, Vitess only supports best-effort distributed transactions. So, it’s possible that a distributed commit only completes partially, leaving data in an inconsistent state.
At this point, 2 Phase Commit (2PC) is the only known protocol that allows you to give atomic guarantees for distributed transactions. For this protocol to work, a database must be able to support the ‘Prepare’ contract.
May 20, 2016
CMU's New Graduate Database System Internals Course
Andy reflects on his laborious effort to teach a new course on database system internals.
April 26, 2016
Vitess V2: Now with more V3
Starting with Vitess v2.0.0-beta.2, the VTGate V3 API can route complex single-shard queries (containing joins, subqueries, aggregation, sorting, and any combination thereof) as well as perform cross-shard joins. That means you no longer need to tell VTGate the keyspace ID that a query targets, as you did with the VTGate V2 API.
The fact that keyspace IDs are now hidden from the application has enabled drop-in Vitess libraries for standard database interfaces like JDBC (written by Flipkart), PDO (written by Pixel Federation), PEP 249, and database/sql.