nosql

Andy Pavlo opens CMU’s database systems course with a claim that reframes most of what practitioners argue about online: the problems are not new. The hardware changed; the problems didn’t. This week’s Classic of the Week is his Lecture 1 — course information plus a compressed history of database systems from the 1960s to the present. It’s the single best hour for understanding why databases look the way they do, and it comes with an implicit warning: if you don’t know this history, you will spend your career re-litigating settled debates....

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....

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-06-06 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Systems / Databases. Citation: Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall, Werner Vogels — Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store. SOSP ‘07. DOI: 10.1145/1294261.1294281 Canonical PDF: Amazon Dynamo paper (Werner Vogels’ archive) Why the paper still matters Almost every popular “NoSQL” key-value store of the last fifteen years — Cassandra, Riak, Voldemort, DynamoDB (the service), early versions of Redis Cluster, parts of MongoDB’s replica routing — pulls its core design vocabulary directly from Dynamo: consistent hashing for partitioning, vector clocks for divergence tracking, sloppy quorums with hinted handoff for availability under failure, and read repair / Merkle-tree anti-entropy for eventual convergence....