databases

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week. Area: Databases. Author: E. F. Codd (IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377–387 DOI: 10.1145/362384.362685 Why the paper still matters Codd’s paper is eight pages long, contains no system, no benchmark, and no evaluation section. It would very likely struggle to get past a modern program committee. It is also, by a wide margin, the most economically consequential paper in the history of computer science — the entire relational database industry, SQL, the query optimizer as a discipline, and by extension most of what we call “data infrastructure” descend from it....

Weekly Video Notes — Classic of the Week. A foundational talk revisited, with source video and key frames embedded throughout. Most Turing Award lectures are a victory lap through the technical contribution. Stonebraker refuses. He shows up without the tie the videographer asked for (“that just isn’t me”), announces that the audience isn’t a database crowd so he’ll have to teach them some database first, and then delivers 75 minutes braiding two stories together: the design and near-death of Postgres, and a tandem bicycle trip he and his wife rode across America....

There are perhaps a trillion active SQLite databases in the world. Roughly half the filesystem I/O on the phone in your pocket goes through it. And it is maintained by three committers. That ratio — planetary deployment, three-person team — is the actual subject of this talk. Richard Hipp, SQLite’s creator, spends 54 minutes explaining the machinery that makes it possible, and the answer is not cleverness. It is a testing regime borrowed wholesale from the avionics industry, plus a willingness to redesign the product itself so it can be tested at all....

Almost every distributed database you touch today inherited something from a single 2007 SOSP paper. Cassandra is essentially its open-source descendant; Riak, Voldemort, and a decade of “eventually consistent” architecture trace back to the same document. This Papers We Love Tokyo session — the chapter’s inaugural talk, presented by Corrina Sivak — is a rare thing: a walkthrough by someone reading it as a working engineer rather than as an authority, complete with audience interruptions, honest “this might be a gap in my understanding,” and a genuinely useful comparison of what the paper described versus what AWS actually ships today....

arXiv: 2607.13276 · PDF: 2607.13276.pdf Authors: Marc Brooker, Marc Bowes, et al. (Amazon Web Services) TL;DR Aurora DSQL is AWS’s new serverless, PostgreSQL-compatible OLTP database designed for multi-region active-active writes. The architecture disaggregates compute (Firecracker MicroVMs running stateless SQL), storage, and transaction coordination into independent horizontally-scalable services. It uses MVCC with precision timestamps for coordination-free reads and optimistic concurrency control for writes, deferring all coordination to commit time via distributed adjudicators and a Journal replication tier....

arXiv: 2607.02401 · PDF: pdf · Published: 2026-07-02 TL;DR NVM key-value stores have gotten fast at ingest and point lookup, but they’ve skipped the interface guarantees a real database engine needs: point-in-time snapshots, consistent iterators, and atomic batches. FlintKV is an NVM-optimized, skiplist-based engine that natively supports all three under durable linearizability, using a novel flat-combining multi-version concurrency control algorithm co-designed with its persistence path. Standalone it beats prior work by up to 75% in end-to-end throughput; its durable skiplist can also be dropped into existing NVM stores as a component upgrade....

Paper: Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database, Corbett et al., OSDI 2012. Canonical URL: research.google/pubs/pub39966 Every week we spotlight a foundational paper that still shapes how systems are built. This week — as the digest surfaces new BFT consensus (Cadence) and NVM storage (FlintKV) work — we rotate to databases and revisit the paper that arguably did the most to reset the industry’s assumptions about what a distributed OLTP system can offer: Spanner....

This week’s Classic of the Week is Pat Helland’s 2017 Kafka Summit keynote — a 20-minute tour that maps five great physicists onto the laws of distributed systems. It’s the rare classic talk that you can hand to a junior engineer to teach them what “eventual” really means, and to a senior engineer to remind them why their replication protocol keeps surprising them in production. Helland has been building distributed systems since 1978 (Tandem, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce)....

This is the talk every backend engineer eventually watches. Jeff Dean walks Stanford’s distinguished lecture audience through eleven years of evolution in Google’s search infrastructure — from a single-machine inverted index in 1999 to a planet-scale system serving thousands of queries per second with sub-second updates. The value of the lecture isn’t the specific numbers; it’s how he reasons about each rewrite as a response to one constraint becoming unbearable, and the design patterns that survived across seven major rewrites....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-06-20 CS paper digest. Area: Databases / Systems. Authors: Georg Kreuzmayr (TigerBeetle), Muhammad El-Hindi (TUM), Benjamin Wagner (Firebolt), Tobias Ziegler (TigerBeetle), Viktor Leis (TUM) arXiv: 2606.19969 · PDF TL;DR For two decades distributed database systems treated the network as an opaque, kernel-managed pipe and the kernel TCP stack was fast enough that this abstraction was free. It isn’t anymore....