early releases of ideas on data-centric computing
I can t resist blogging about the performance results we re seeing for the Hydroflow dataflow runtime. This is a Rust-based library that is part of the Hydro project (more background below!) You can think about Hydroflow as a single-node dataflow library, kind of like Spark or Pandas, written in Rust. Except that (a) Hydroflow is tuned [ ]
The ACM began commissioning a series of reminiscence books on Turing Award winners. Thanks to hard work by editor Michael Brodie, the first one is Mike Stonebraker s book, which just came out. I was asked to write the chapter on Postgres. I was one of the large and distinguished crew of grad students on the [ ]
For folks who care about what s possible in distributed computing: Peter Alvaro and I wrote an introduction to the CALM Theorem and subsequent work that is now up on arXiv. The CALM Theorem formally characterizes the class of programs that can achieve distributed consistency without the use of coordination. I spent a good fraction of [ ]
Colleagues at Berkeley and I have a new paper on the state of serverless computing that will appear at CIDR '19. It celebrates the arrival of public-facing autoscaling cloud programming, but critiques the current serverless offerings for turning their back on the very hallmarks of what makes the cloud exciting: data-centric and distributed computing. We hope it will start a constructive discussion…
tl;dr: We observed that Dynamic Programming is the common base of both database query optimization and reinforcement learning. Based on this, we designed a deep reinforcement learning algorithm for database query optimization we call DQ. We show that DQ is highly effective and more generally adaptable than any of the prior approaches in the database [ ]
Over at the RISElab blog, we have a post on the latest updates to the Anna KVS. Anna started out as the fastest KVS we are aware of (by orders of magnitude!), with the widest choice of consistency models. It achieved that in part by using beaucoup de resources to replicate entire databases in memory. [ ]
There s fast and there s fast. This post is about Anna*, a key/value database design from our team at Berkeley that s got phenomenal speed and buttery smooth scaling, with an unprecedented range of consistency guarantees. Details are in our upcoming ICDE18 paper on Anna. Conventional wisdom (or at least Jeff Dean wisdom) says that you have [ ]
Requirements for metadata have changed drastically in recent years. How should data-driven organizations respond? Let me offer some pointedly lousy ideas.
As mentioned in my previous post, Peter Alvaro turned in his PhD thesis a month back, and is now in full swing as a professor at UC Santa Cruz. In the midst of that nifty academic accomplishment, he succeeded in taking the last chapter of his thesis from our BOOM project out of the ivory tower and into [ ]
It s been a while since I ve taken the time to write a blog post here. If there s one topic that deserves a catchup post in the last few months, it s the end of an era for my former students Peter Alvaro and Peter Bailis—henceforth Professor Peter A of UC Santa Cruz, and Professor Peter B of Stanford. Each of them officially turned [ ]