papers-we-love

Two papers landed on arXiv the same day, from Cornell and TU Darmstadt, with the same idea: skip the general-purpose query engine and have an LLM agent compile each SQL query directly into specialized C++. GenDB and BespokeOLAP report 10x over DuckDB on TPC-H, 460x over Postgres, and per-query wins up to 1,466x. Alex Kouzemtchenko, CTO of Espresso AI, walked Papers We Love Brooklyn through both — and the interesting part of the talk is the half spent on what the numbers don’t say....

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....