transactions

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....

🔁 Seminal Paper of the Week — a foundational classic chosen to anchor the May 17–23, 2026 weekly digest. Area rotated to Databases this week. Authors: C. Mohan, Don Haerder, Bruce Lindsay, Hamid Pirahesh, Peter Schwarz (IBM Almaden, 1992) Venue: ACM Transactions on Database Systems, Vol. 17, No. 1 DOI: 10.1145/128765.128770 TL;DR ARIES is the recovery algorithm. It combines write-ahead logging (WAL), steal + no-force buffer management, physiological logging, and a three-pass restart (Analysis → Redo → Undo) with compensation log records (CLRs) that make undo idempotent....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the May 17–23, 2026 CS paper digest. Area: Databases. Author: Philip A. Bernstein (Microsoft Research) arXiv: 2605.20466 · PDF Origin: Extended version of the SIGMOD 2025 short paper of the same name. TL;DR This is not a survey paper. It is a personal retrospective by one of the people who has been doing transaction-processing research continuously for fifty years — author of Concurrency Control and Recovery in Distributed Database Systems (1987), co-author of the original Hyder design, and contributor to TAPIR/Chablis/Orleans transactions....