Database Architects

I have always been interested in Zero-Overhead Deterministic Exceptions from P0709, as they promised a nicer implementation model and they are much easier to integrate into JIT-compiled code.

As the number of CPU cores keeps growing, the scalability of concurrent data structures becomes increasingly important.

During automated testing we stumbled upon a problem that boiled down to transitive comparisons: If a=b, and a=c, when we assumed that b=c.

Query compilation based on the produce/consume model has a reputation for delivering high query performance, but also for being more difficult to implement than interpretation-based engines using vectorized execution.

On a whim I decided to do this years advent of code in pure SQL.

In November, I had the pleasure of attending the Dutch-Belgian DataBase Day, where I moderated a panel on practical challenges often overlooked in database research.

About three years ago we noticed serious performance problems in C++ exception unwinding.

Due to better access locality, B-trees are faster than binary search trees in practice -- but are they also better in theory?

In recent years, flash-based SSDs have largely replaced disks for most storage use cases.

For at least five decades, Moore's law consistently delivered increasing numbers of transistors.

Since 1975, over 24 thousand articles have have been published in major database venues (SIGMOD, VLDB/PVLDB, ICDE, EDBT, CIDR, TODS, VLDB Journal, TKDE).

The Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) 2023 is over, and as usual both the official program and the informal discussions have been great.

This article is part of the series about scalable unwinding that starts here.

This article is part of the series about scalable unwinding that starts here.

This article is part of the series about scalable unwinding that starts here.

This article is part of the series about scalable unwinding that starts here.

Exceptions are a very handy mechanism to propagate errors in C++ programs, but unfortunately they do not scale very well.

Everyone knows that the major cloud vendors try to make it easy to get data in, and hard to get it out.

Many database management systems carefully manage disk I/O operations and explicitly cache pages in main memory.

Over the past decade, AWS EC2 has introduced many new instance types with different hardware configurations and prices.

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) based on flash have largely replaced magnetic disks as the standard storage medium.

When operating on hierarchical data structures, it is often convenient to formulate that using pairwise recursive functions.

Since C++11, multi-threaded C++ code has been governed by a rigorous memory model.

Standard compiler are usually used with hand-written programs.

When picking a hash table size we usually have two choices: Either, we pick a prime number or a power of 2.

Cuckoo Filters are an interesting alternative to Bloom filters.