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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I feel like we need an index somewhere of which consensus papers contain safety counterexamples for other consensus papers nestled somewhere in the appendix.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Why are database benchmarks always some nicely assembled TPC queries and not just an utter horror unleashed upon the world? Join Order Benchmark is just IMDB. JuniorVoluteerDataEngBench would be so appalling people would say “that’s not a realistic workload/query”… because it’s too realistic.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

arxiv.org/abs/2505.0... has a couple diagrams that I think capture well their good filtered vector search taxonomy

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Someone really needs to make a DBaaSaaS company

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

This is a great post. I’ve had a few different “suboperators are cool” conversations, and this does a great job at going through the details of why a suboperator DAG is a very useful and sufficiently general IR.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I’m not sure this really needed a diagram…?

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

It looks like Active Disk Paxos includes essentially the paxos edit that CASPaxos proposed, and would probably get credit for it too if the paper wasn't so frustratingly difficult to work through.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

I too understood what consensus is better by pondering exactly how/why ABD cannot support Compare-And-Swap operations. (And also after reading Murat's blogs.) I feel like a number of database/distsys concepts are easier to learn by looking instead at good examples of what they are not.

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@clflushopt @clflushopt.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

finally managed to finish a draft i started working on a month ago about Inkfuse, continuations and query execution paradigms deferworks.org/posts/inkfus...

deferworks.org

Inkfuse, Continuations and Query Compilation | Opinions on Software.

Ramblings on databases, compilers and software matters.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

[arXiv] Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP arxiv.org/abs/2607.1... It's a DSQL paper, hot off the presses! Query processing in firecracker! Erasure coding on logs! The origin story of the turmoil crate! All cool stuff! Can't sneak an arXiv upload past me, Marc. :p

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

[VLDB '24] X-Stor: A Cloud-native NoSQL Database Service with Multi-model Support www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... Aside from the "everything can be implemented on top of a wide column store", there's a surprisingly detailed discussion of implementing modern multitenancy.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

[ATC'22] DepFast: Orchestrating Code of Quorum Systems www.usenix.org/confe... Quorum objects make for clean code. I really appreciate these "how to write distsys code in more correct and manageable ways" papers.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

[arXiv] Beyond Chunk-Then-Embed arxiv.org/abs/2602.1... I had assumed that, when chunking (large) documents for embedding, adding context about the document to the chunk would always be superior, and it was interesting to see that's not *always* the case.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

[arXiv] Beyond Cosine Similarity arxiv.org/abs/2602.0... I almost always see cosine, and it was interesting to read about similarity metrics as classes of more and less restrictive similarity measures.

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The Consensus @theconsensus.dev · 27/06/2026

In most languages, you hunt allocations down with a profiler and they creep back the moment you touch the hot path. Jane Street's superset of OCaml lets you flip that around: annotate a function with [@zero_alloc] and the compiler refuses to build if anything in its call tree touches the heap.

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South Bay Systems @southbaysystems.xyz · 10/06/2026

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

luma.com

South Bay Systems: Caching & Clustering · Luma

Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you two wonderful talks: Yao Yue will speak about her experiences working on Caching…

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

@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/...

vldb.org

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

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

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

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

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Qian Li @qianli.dev · 13/05/2026

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=...

luma.com

South Bay Systems: Queues & RDBMS Extensibility · Luma

Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you two wonderful talks: Himank Chaudhary will explain how the queuing infrastructure in…

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

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

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Murat (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

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.

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

Hybrid Logical Clocks

Here I will write about our recent work on Hybrid Logical Clocks, which provides a feasible alternative to Google's TrueTime. A brief hist...

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Qian Li @qianli.dev · 17/03/2026

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

luma.com

South Bay Systems: Consensus & Full Text Search · Luma

Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you two wonderful talks: Sugu Sougoumarane will be speaking about deconstructing consensus…

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

[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).

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

[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.

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PVLDB @pvldb.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

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

Thumbnail: Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

[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.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

[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....

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

[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.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 08/03/2026

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.

scour.ing

Scour

Scour interesting reads from noisy feeds you can't keep up with and smaller sites you didn't know to check.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

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 🤞

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 01/02/2026

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?

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South Bay Systems @southbaysystems.xyz · 05/01/2026

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

luma.com

South Bay Systems: Innovative Data Systems Research · Luma

Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you three wonderful talks from authors at the just-finishing Conference in Innovative Data…

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 30/12/2025

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

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 28/12/2025

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.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

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.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

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.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

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

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 15/11/2025

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

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South Bay Systems @southbaysystems.xyz · 07/11/2025

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

luma.com

South Bay Systems: Morel / Query Optimization as a Service · Luma

Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time we bring you two wonderful talks: Julian Hyde will be speaking about Morel, a new functional…

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South Bay Systems @southbaysystems.xyz · 01/11/2025

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

youtu.be

Apache Pinot on Object Storage & JSON in Apache Doris

YouTube video by South Bay Systems

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

[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.

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Alex Miller @alexmillerdb.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

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...

transactional.blog

Copy-and-Patch: A Copy-and-Patch Tutorial

If you can ctrl-c and ctrl-v, you can build a JIT.

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South Bay Systems @southbaysystems.xyz · 13/10/2025

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

luma.com

South Bay Systems: Apache Pinot on Object Storage / Variants in Apache Doris · Luma

Welcome to another edition of South Bay Systems! This time, we'll have a double feature! First we'll have Songqiao Su and Raghav Yadav talking about…

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