Sorry for the delay in blogging...

Been really pretty busy... New things are coming, though!

Sorry for the delay in posting on this blog. It’s been BUSY for me! Not only am I loving my job at Salesforce (that keeps me busy), lots of other stuff has been happening.

Last August, my wife and I moved 850 miles North from the Bay Areas to Bellevue, WA. Moving was a very time consuming prospect but we are both VERY happy to be back in the Northwest. Fortunately, I was able to change my license plate without changing my license plate.

I spent a number of months working on a 30 page paper for CIDR (Conference on Innovative Database Research). The print-ready deadline was December 14th and it was a huge effort. After that, I started experimenting with creating videos for presentations to provide one for the CIDR paper:

• Decoupled Transactions: Low Latency Online Transactions Atop Jittery Servers

  • This is a thought experiment about how we could POSSIBLY build a snapshot isolated database that continues providing low tail-latency service even when a bounded subset of the servers experience gray failures.

  • In my typical fashion, I get curious and keep digging deeper:

    • Cloud datacenters exhibit more and more failures where stuff is just slow but not necessarily dead. Can a database tolerate this while remaining responsive?

    • This led me to deeply consider how a database knows what it knows and if this can be managed without depending on anything centralized. Hence, we can’t count on any total order of operations.

    • There were many aspects of distributed systems that caught my attention.

• Decoupled Transactions video (12 minutes):

  • Over the last two weeks of 2021, I attempted to summarize the essence of this 30 page paper in a 12 minute video.

  • Reflecting on the most important aspects of the paper allowed me to articulate that if we want to be responsive, we need to consider the interaction of total order and partial order and design a solution based on partial order, quorum, and confluence (code that tolerates reordered execution).

  • Along the way, I learned a lot about new features in Powerpoint to record video presentations. It’s been fun!

Separately, I have a new paper appearing soon in ACM Queue. The new paper is on an old topic. For more than 23 years, I’ve spoken about Autonomous Computing. For example, here’s a link to the Autonomous Computing slides I presented in 2001 at HPTS (the High Performance Transaction Systems) workshop.

To support the upcoming ACM Queue article, I’ve launched a new newsletter on Autonomous Computing within my blog. I just published an update to a longer version of the Autonomous Computing paper.

I’ve also been working on multiple presentations for my brand new YouTube channel. Please be patient with me as I learn more about posting videos to YouTube. For example, I’m still learning about thumbnails and metadata for videos.

Anyway, this post is to let you know I’m working hard on more stuff.

Thanks for your interest and support!

Pat