South Bay Systems returns for its June meetup on June 26th! We'll have two speakers: Yao Yue will talk about her experiences from working on Caching at Twitter and developing Pelikan, and Eric Liang will talk about Databrick's history-based data clustering feature. Register at luma.com/ogvfeacv

@jpountz.bsky.social from your thoughts on ACORN-1, I think you’d really like naviX of you haven’t seen it. Kuzu was doing a lot of cool stuff before acquisition 😢 www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/...

The recording from this event is now available! youtu.be/9LiSWbRASKc

It appears there’s no sigmod programming contest for 2026? 16 year streak of cool projects ended. 😢

Achievement unlocked (From “How to write to SSDs” arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09927)

Our next @southbaysystems.xyz meetup is on May 26! We're covering one of my favorite topics: databases, and how to use them to make better architectural decisions and build reliable systems. Food and drinks will be provided courtesy of our hosts at PingCAP. Register here: luma.com/3j9twotu?tk=...

South Bay Systems returns for its April meetup on the 30th. This time we have @cliffclick.bsky.social giving a walkthrough of his teaching language for Sea of Nodes! Sign up now! luma.com/nnq9aq27

The recording from the last talk is up! youtu.be/TeFsBVIYBis

If you're an RSS user and a South Bay Systems attendee, I've added an RSS feed for the events at southbaysystems.xyz/...

I built a small interactive visualizer for Hybrid Logical Clocks (HLC). I used Claude Code to put this together quickly and make the behavior visible step by step. Try it here: muratdem.github.io/hlc-visualiz... Feedback welcome. Share if useful.

Our next South Bay Systems meetup will be on March 31. We've got two awesome deep-dive talks from Sugu Sougoumarane (Consensus and Multigres) and @stuhood.sh (Full-Text Search and ParadeDB). Food and beverages will be provided, courtesy of our host, Snowflake. Register here: luma.com/2g3exvjw

[CIDR '25] Linear Elastic Caching via Ski Rental www.vldb.org/cidrdb/... You should consider that holding a page in cache costs you, because RAM itself is expensive, and existing page replacement algorithms look at sizing cache independently (via miss-ratio curves).

[arXiv] Dynamic read & write optimization with TurtleKV arxiv.org/pdf/2509.1... TurtleKV shows a way to elastically move around the RUM conjecture space depending on what is important at the moment.

Vol:19 No:3 → Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems 👥 Authors: Xinjing Zhou, Viktor Leis, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker 📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p334-zhou.pdf

[VLDB '26] Garnet: A Next-Generation Cache-Store for Accelerating Applications and Services www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... It's fast, durable redis, brought to you by Badrish Chandramouli (et. al), known for other 🔥 work like FASTER and Bf-tree.

[CIDR '25] Adaptive Factorization Using Linear-Chained Hash Tables vldb.org/cidrdb/pape... Adaptive execution + factorization + WCOJ = great paper. The best intro to factorized databases I know of is www.youtube.com/watc....

[VLDB '25] MD-MVCC: Multi-version Concurrency Control for Schema Changes in Azure SQL Database www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... A great discussion of the end-to-end impact of allowing multiple versions of schema metadata information to be live concurrently, in a real, production system.

https://scour.ing/ has gotten pretty good at surfacing what new stuff I actually want to read on the internet, better than following subreddits. You can see my feed of mostly database things at scour.ing/@linearizable. It surfaces small personal blogs particularly well.

The recording finally went great this time. I also demo'd doing a backup audio recording so that we can more reliably get a good recording to post, so hopefully the trend will continue 🤞

Does anyone know of a good webapp or discord bot or something to help manage a reading group? Something that keeps a list of suggesting things to read, can do voting on the next thing to read, and maybe has a bit of curation support for when the to-read list gets unmanageable?

Our next event will be on January 21st, featuring speakers from (the just-finishing) CIDR! Come to Databricks to hear about: * DuckDB on xNVMe by @pinartozun.bsky.social of ITU * Spilling in QP by Maximilian Kuschewski of TUM * NPUs in DBs by Alexander Baumstark of TU-Ilmenau luma.com/8a54z94d

I’ve recently seen multiple, unrelated instances of people referencing Bf-trees. Good job, @benjdd.com.

Asking a coding agent to run `cargo build` and read referenced source files for context has made LLMs significantly more helpful and accurate at actually understanding why a compilation error is happening and being able to explain an appropriate fix. Much better than copy-pasting into online LLMs.

It’s frustrating how a bunch of database research from 1980s and before basically doesn’t exist anymore because it’s not on the internet, and it’s not even in the IEEE/ACM indexes of published work.

Does anyone have links to good writing on the sort of soft skills you learn from working in larger organizations about how to work in larger organizations as an IC? The overall space of soft skills dealing with the pretty common ways that large corporations behave.

Looking forward to reading about which disaggregated architecture HorizonDB aligned itself with

So what’s the feature set difference between pgDog, Neki, and multigres?

Our next event is on November 19th at StarTree’s office in downtown Mountain View. Come hear about Morel from Julian Hyde and and Query Optimization as a Service from Yuanyuan Tian! luma.com/xygolo9c

The recording from our last South Bay Systems meetup is now available! youtu.be/f1bz3efUJpM

@abigalekim.bsky.social @xiangpeng.systems and I are kicking off Madison Systems with a coffee chat on Sunday, Nov 9th. Come nerd out on systems! luma.com/v69tvpla

[PVLDB] Enhancing Transaction Processing through Indirection Skipping www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... Whereas VMCache improve pointer swizzing's complexity by removing the swizzling, this work points out that page and frame hints are highly effective, and okay if they're wrong.

This reminded me I've been sitting on draft blog posts about Copy-and-Patch JIT compilation for a while, and so I've finally published the first chunk of it: a minimal tutorial and explanation of how and why Copy-and-Patch actually works. Start at transactional.blog/copy-and-pat...

South Bay Systems returns on October 27th at Adobe in downtown San Jose. We have an Analytics-on-Object-Storage double feature this time starring two different Apache projects: Apache Pinot and Apache Doris. (Talk descriptions below.) Register now! luma.com/9o6bahgc

There was an accident with the recording where audio wasn't captured, so instead we can offer a recording from one of Jakob's practice runs on twitch: www.twitch.tv/videos/25845...

Had a fun time at the South Bay Systems meetup last night. Thanks @yugabytedb.bsky.social for hosting! @codedrift.social gave a great talk on WebAssembly: what it is (and isn't), how it connects to WASI, and promising projects. He cuts through a lot of the hype vs. reality. Recording coming soon.

[ASPLOS'25] Fusion: An Analytics Object Store Optimized for Query Pushdown www.cs.princeton.edu... Tightly integrating an Iceberg catalog with an object store means that one could make file-format aware erasure coding decisions, to permit pushing down filters and aggregations.

[VLDB] Towards Principled, Practical Document Database Design www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... If you've ever wished that there was a document database equivalent for relational databases' 3NF-style schema design guidance, then this is the paper for you.

[arXiv] On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval arxiv.org/abs/2508.2... It's impossible to retrieve all combinations of pairs of documents post-embedding. Thus, there's usecases that vector search won't do well at. Conversely, BM25 excels in these cases.

I text-to-speech papers often, and www.paper2audio.com finally did the one thing that I was hoping AI would enable: replace tables/figures/diagrams with a summary of what is being shown. It makes table/diagram-heavy papers actually comprehensible. There's iOS and Android apps, and it's free.

[VLDB] NaviX: A Native Vector Index Design for Graph DBMSs With Robust Predicate-Agnostic Search Performance www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... It feels like a follow-on/improvement to ACORN. Also interesting to see HNSW built directly on a graph database working well.

Someone should go implement a bulk loading into btree mechanism relying on man7.org/linux/man-pa... to be able to prepare a tree of data, and then just atomically drop it into the main btree file as a sub-tree, as that'd be pretty cool to read about.

There’s surprisingly been no good citation for follower reads and the trade-offs therein. Super excited that this finally got published. law-theorem.com had “Coming soon!” for a few years 😭

For anyone else trying to catch up on DBSP, my recommended flow of learning is: 1. Watch the talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=omOH... (h/t @wslim.bsky.social) 2. Read the spec/book: mihaibudiu.github.io/work/dbsp-sp... (h/t @avi.im) 3. Read the VLDB paper List is ordered by assumed knowledge of reader

In the Postgres-style MVCC vs MySQL-style MVCC debates, I'd really love to see an implementation of time-separated btrees (dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...) evaluated. It's CoW-BTree style "your path down the tree prunes out versions you don't want to see", but update-in-place and copies only on splits.

People often ask me about the differences in architecture between Amazon Dynamo (the 2007 SOSP paper), DynamoDB (the AWS serverless NoSQL database), and Aurora DSQL (the AWS serverless SQL databases). I memoized the response on my blog. brooker.co.za/blog/2025/08...

[arXiv] Theseus: A Distributed and Scalable GPU-Accelerated Query Processing Platform Optimized for Efficient Data Movement arxiv.org/pdf/2508.0... Great to see that Voltron Data folk writing about their GPU database!

Today’s NULL BITMAP is a very special one—I have been doing NULL BITMAP every week for two years, and to celebrate, this week I got a collection of friends to put together a printable zine of articles. I hope you enjoy it! buttondown.com/jaffray/arch...

To randomly sample a number of operations, one pulls from a PRNG. github.com/buildup-d... instead shows a cute trick for defining a stateless PRNG: pull RDTSC, run it through a quick hash to scramble the bits (e.g. rapidhash). Cache-miss-free, but you lose determinism in tests.

We had our biggest @southbaysystems.xyz meetup yet last night! Thanks to everyone who came, and thanks to Databricks for hosting! @andypavlo.bsky.social discussed the 50-year history of database tuning, applying AI/ML to the problem, and the future of auto-tuning (agentic reasoning, of course).

If you have a blog hosted on cloudflare pages and any part of your css looks missing only on safari, it's because of www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/ps..., and you have to go purge the cache to get rid of the cached wrongly-compressed asset files.