What is up with Berlin Marathon pacers this year? The 3:30 guy just came up behind the 3:45 guy, and I saw five 3:00 pacers spread out across twenty minutes at least.
dave
@daveliepmann.com
513 followers 486 following 1.4K posts
berlin american abundance degrowther tech bro luddite ———————————— cargo bike & bahn dad prehistory fanboy
![How do databases get scaling wrong? For decades, I assumed
each record had a "home" for its “current” value within a partition,
a block, or a data structure (e.g. B+Tree[8]). I assumed the DB had
to go to the record’s “home” to update and/or read the “current”
value. For more than 45 years, I didn’t question this assumption.
I repent? that belief. The BIG DEAL reads the past and verifies to
avoid conflicts in the future. There’s no NOW, no “current” values,
and no “home for a current value”.
How do applications get scaling wrong? Most OLTP applica-
tions synchronously aggregate application knowledge as it changes.
As systems scale, modifying records shared across users becomes
untenable due to increased contention. If an application cannot
aggregate changes synchronously, the best it can do is aggregate
knowledge gradually in later transactions. Scalable applications
coalesce their knowledge of the past slowly. They are also more
ambiguous about their commitments for the future. See §3.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:yxcp4vl2akrv7dlhzrvprxfj/bafkreielie33qyp4tqajd4lyvglfvihr2jvbo2t6rfnuulgitehl5s76ry)
