[new blog post] Best of metadata in 2025 muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/12/best...

[new blog post] Mitigating Application Resource Overload with Targeted Task Cancellation muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/miti...

Wow! Jesse Welles performed his song “Join ICE” on the Colbert Show last night. 🏆

Registration is now open for CIDR 2026 from January 18th-21st in Santa Cruz! Hope to see you all there! cidrdb.org/cidr2026/reg...

[new blog post] Disaggregated Database Management Systems muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/disa...

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer. He is a computer safety researcher. And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine. In under 1600 words. aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

[new blog post] Taurus MM: A Cloud-Native Shared-Storage Multi-Master Database muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/taur...

@matsuzawa.bsky.social www.wsj.com/lifestyle/fo...

[new blog post] Taurus Database: How to be Fast, Available, and Frugal in the Cloud muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/taur...

[new blog post] TLA+ Modeling of AWS outage DNS race condition muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/tla-...

I love the point made here. We actually _need_ to do the work, and feel the pain, of our existing situation to be motivated to understand and fix it. I think often times we don't understand how important our suffering is to a victory that actually matters. "Beware of unearned wisdom" - Carl Jung

[new blog post] Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/barb...

Academic chat: On PhD This week, Aleksey and I didn’t dissect a paper, we talked about the process of doing a PhD: the 5 Cs of research, how taste develops, why sparring matters, what academia can learn from industry's onboarding process! muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/acad...

[new blog post] Tiga: Accelerating Geo-Distributed Transactions with Synchronized Clocks muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/tiga...

My review of a classic of Argentine sci-fi comics, now a Netflix series in Spanish. emptysqua.re/blog/the-ete...

Kelsey Roman performing with aerial silks hanging from the West Trapps cliff in the Gunks, at sunset and moonrise. emptysqua.re/blog/aerial-...

[new blog post] The Invisible Curriculum of Research muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

Four Ivies. Two Days. muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/four... This is my long-overdue trip report from last summer. For campus visits, we toured Yale and Brown, followed by Princeton and UPenn the next day. Of course we drove, that's how we roll. This time we got to rank the schools.

[new blog post] Supporting our AI overlords: Redesigning data systems to be Agent-first muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/supp...

[new blog post] Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/disa...

[new blog post] Our Myrtle Beach vacation muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/myrt...

Vol:18 No:8 → HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication 👥 Authors: Zhiying Liang, Vahab Jabrayilov, Abutalib Aghayev, Aleksey Charapko 📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p2505-charapko.pdf

[new blog post] Recent Reads (September 25) muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/rece...

[new blog post] Asymmetric Linearizable Local Reads muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/asym...

Vol:18 No:12 → Design and Modular Verification of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB 👥 Authors: William Schultz, Murat Demirbas 📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p5045-schultz.pdf

VLDB has published my colleagues' terrific paper MongoDB distributed transactions: how they work, how we checked them with TLA+, how we checked that our code conforms to our TLA+ spec.

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

The epic continues: emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

[new blog post] Cabinet: Dynamically Weighted Consensus Made Fast muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/cabi...

I'm beginning an epic journey to understand the 1990 paper "Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment" emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

[new blog post] Vive la Difference: Practical Diff Testing of Stateful Applications (VLDB'25) muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/vive... Safe rollouts of stateful apps. Instantly branches Postgres DBs, replays prod-like requests on old & new versions, and shows 3-way diffs of outputs + DB state.

[new blog post] Towards Optimal Transaction Scheduling (VLDB'24) muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/towa...

🏆 Winners of the first-ever #ai meets #tlaplus challenge: 🥇 From code to TLA+ specs, automatically. 🥈 Grammar-constrained AI that speaks TLA+. 🥉 Generating correct Rust from TLA+ specs. Full details 👉 foundation.tlapl.us/challenge

[new blog post] Neurosymbolic AI: The 3rd Wave muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/neur...

new blog post] Neurosymbolic AI: Why, What, and How muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/neur...

[new blog post] Can a Client–Server Cache Tango Accelerate Disaggregated Storage? muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/can-...

[new blog post] Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/tran...

[new blog post] Analysing Snapshot Isolation muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/anal...

[new blog post] Recent Reads (July 2025) muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/rece...

[new blog post] Real Life Is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too! (HotOS'25) muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/real... Aleksey and I recorded our reading/discussion section. It is also available through the blog post, and is instructive for how to read papers.

Tired Using callbacks to implement non-blocking I/O Wired Using callbacks to implement partial re-execution of transactions that violate serializability, avoiding full aborts bsky.app/profile/mura...

[new blog post] Morty: Scaling Concurrency Control with Re-Execution It tackles how to scale serializable interactive transactions. It uses semantic re-execution to rewind just the stale part with continuations on recent placement/data. muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/mort...

Hear me out: a YouTube show where two distributed systems experts screen-share and live-annotate new papers + asking questions, + predicting what’s next, + dunking on unclear diagrams, and + geeking out over clever ideas in the paper. basically: Twitch meets SOSP/OSDI

[new blog post] Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/seri...

ICML found hidden prompts in accepted papers. They have released a statement icml.cc/Conferences/... Yes, it’s unacceptable. So is using an LLM to review a paper. Peer review is so broken.

The talk for this (award-winning!) ATC '25 paper was especially good. Be sure to check it out when the video becomes available! Evangelos Lamprou @vagoz.bsky.social et al. The Koala Benchmarks for the Shell: Characterization and Implications. ATC 2025. www.usenix.org/conference/a...

Emery is sigma! @emeryberger.bsky.social Wow, I checked it. I did really write that. muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/atco... I get too carried away when blogging I guess. I mean the swag rant is also... jeez. muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/atco...

[new blog post] ATC/OSDI’25 Technical Sessions muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/atco...

[new blog post] ATC/OSDI 2025 impressions muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/atco...

My colleagues Will Schultz and Siyuan Zhou wrote about a Raft enhancement they prototyped in TLA+, it's now how MongoDB actually adds and removes servers: www.mongodb.com/blog/post/te...