PSA: Following a sample of my latest teaching review: "Prof Crooks's accent is somewhat distracting. I think it's something to do with the rise in pitch at the end of a sentence". I will now be adopting a Texas drawl in honour of my UT PhD. Please bear with me as I perfect it over the next year.

The US Administration has indefinitely blocked *all* student visa applicants from getting a visa interview. Worldwide, unconditional, no end date. All. International students are crucial to the US university system, American innovation, and future US prosperity.

They’re basically just trying to kill off US higher education as an industry at this point. Even a delay will pose a critical decision for thousands of prospective students whose futures are now in the air.

It’s that time of the year again, when the air smells fresh, the flowers are blooming and systems researchers are in a windowless room because it’s the SOSP deadline! I wrote these hints on writing an SOSP paper some time ago but it’s still a great reference. irenezhang.net/blog/2021/06...

Very grateful to be part of the 2025 Sloan Research Fellow cohort. Thank you my fantastic students and amazing colleagues who have made this possible! Many of them will be graduating soon. Hire them!

📢📢VLDB26 (@vldb.bsky.social) will have a ShadowPC! Apply at forms.office.com/e/XYihKj4UKq by March 1! Great opportunity for folk who are new to the data management community & want to gain paper reviewing experience. More info at application form. Chairs: @zistvan.bsky.social, Tianzheng Wang, & I.

Anyone currently applying for a green card seeing their estimated processing time creep up significantly?

I wanted to go through the rest of the disaggregated OLTP papers in detail, as I'd missed a few, so I'm re-reading everything and incrementally filling in more papers on transactional.blog/notes-on/dis... Recent additions are overviews for Aurora Serverless and PolarFS.

Continuing from yesterday's blog post, today I look at an interesting isolation edge-case from the literature: Fekete's Anomaly. How does it fit in to our theme of achieving performance, scalability, and reliability through reducing coordination? New blog post here: brooker.co.za/blog/2025/02...

Well this is going to make work interesting ...

I’m an NSF panel reviewer that was scheduled to meet today. Just got notice that all NSF panels were canceled today. I reviewed some innovative proposals in support of students. Devastating if these scholars don’t get to do this work. For the love of science & students I hope this is just a delay.💔

Spring 2025 @cmudb.bsky.social Course: OPTIMIZE! A Journey Through Database Query Optimization This is a survey course on how to build a SQL optimizer from scratch covering foundational and state-of-the-art implementations. All lectures available on YouTube: 15799.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2025/

A poodle, a latte, California sun and @andypavlo.bsky.social's new query optimizer lecture course. Not a bad start to a Saturday morning walk.

Female colleagues in CS: how often a year do you get mistaken for one of your male colleagues' secretary? I'm already at one this year and it's not even Feb! PS: you don't want me coordinating your calendar. I will accidentally double book you and schedule 7 am meetings.

Dear Students, as University X require me to rate your artistitic ability, and University Y require me to rate your competency in a foreign language. I henceforth require all meetings to be conducted in French while dancing a cèilidh as a precondition to me writing a reference. Thank you.

New blog post, diving a little deeper on Snapshot Isolation and Serializability, through the lens of the coordination required to implement them: brooker.co.za/blog/2024/12...

There is a special place in hell for schools that require you to rate applicants across 10 axes for recommendation letters and don't just let you upload the standard PDF.

The PaPoC workshop is once again accepting submissions on distributed consistency. Deadline 15 January papoc-workshop.github.io/2025/cfp.html

I was recently on a panel on "What are important data systems problems, ignored by research?" with @andypavlo.bsky.social and Allison Lee moderated by Viktor Leis - here is the write-up of the discussion databasearchitects.blogspot.com/2024/12/what...

🛬🛂if you are planning to come to SIGMOD in Berlin, make sure to meet your corresponding visa and travel requirements in a timely manner. We have now curated the relevant links to official websites. 2025.sigmod.org/visa.shtml

I am disappointed to see that Brown no longer requires me to rate the artistic ability of the people I am recommending me for PhD admissions in CS. I was enjoying the mandatory tap dancing interview prior to agreeing to write them a letter.

One of the biggest difference between faculty life and student life is deadlines. Deadlines for students are more intense. Feels like all or nothing, all eggs in one project. But then you can relax. I find myself having to delay all *other* important things to Wednesday or Thursday, no rest allowed

Academic Twitter, a (very strong) Iranian student is telling me that he cannot afford the PhD application fee at Berkeley (155$, a month of his father's salary he says). Are there any solutions to request application fee waivers for international students in this situation? Which schools allow it?

I guess nobody said submitting to Osdi would be easy. But trying to reason through BFT proofs with a fever and one eye on the tsunami watch website, is just a little *too* hard.

S3 (Iceberg) Tables is everything I dreamt of, and more. I blogged some long-form thoughts: meltware.com/2024/12/04/s... I think we're about to see an explosion of data tools (@materialize.com, @clickhouse.com, @duckdb.org, et al.) learn to write Iceberg tables via S3 table buckets. #databs

Cornell, Maryland, Max Planck Pre-doctoral Research School in Computer Science (CMMRS) is now open for applications cmmrs.mpi-sws.org Two students of my team attended the 2022 and 2024 editions and I strongly recommend.

I will henceforth also describe myself as “technically just a slow database”. My publisher would probably add “is a PITA to query”

This post was read while procrastinating from writing a recommendation letter.

Seems like a safe bet that object storage as a foundation of data systems architecture is here to stay blog.colinbreck.com/predicting-t...

When OSDI and VLDB deadline pushes clash with family and puppy time. Multitask!

This admissions cycle, I am recruiting PhD students to join my research group! If you're interested in systems or security (including intersections with cryptography, datacenters, AI, etc.), then please apply to UCLA Computer Science and list me on your application as a potential faculty advisor.

I like this paper because it’s a good example of database and OS co-design. A great blog post from @marcbrooker.bsky.social on this: brooker.co.za/blog/2024/07...

My feed is full of discussion/posts about consistency and isolation levels, and devoid of far-right bots making hateful comments. How I'd forgotten how nice it feels. It's the small things in life.

I am very happy that Carnegie Mellon is one of these schools. (And I hope that in future years we can raise the threshold.)

[new blog post] Everything is a Transaction: Unifying Logical Concurrency Control and Physical Data Structure Maintenance in Database Management Systems muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2024/11/ever...

My office is sufficient cold this morning that I am wearing my PhD gown for warmth. Who said a PhD wasn't useful?

I hope that the whole of academic twitter and mastodont reunites. I miss alternating between discussions of multiversioned timestamp ordering in databases and pictures of my dog.