Ryan Marcus

I think many complaints about peer review and publication decisions stem from a basic misunderstanding that goes something like this: I did good science, I wrote it up, and now my peers will read the paper and decide whether the underlying science is good.

How do modern columnar database management systems process a query like this?

I was excited to see that Neo, the neural query optimizer, got its 600th citation!

From database companies to renowned professor of databaseology Andy Pavlo, everyone seems to be writing their “year in review” of the database world.

This tool takes your paper’s title and abstract, and searches past VLDB, PODS, SIGMOD, and CIDR papers for potential related work.

As a query optimization researcher, I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life playing with, learning from, and building on top of the most sophisticated open source query optimizer out there, PostgreSQL.

Ever wondered which database systems papers have been the most influential?

Update March 19th, 2024: this page now uses the gpt-3.5-turbo model.

This post was also published on the MIT DSAIL blog.

Imagine you are writing a system to repeatedly sort large datasets.

Having spent five years heavily involved in teaching the 2nd semester programming course at Brandeis, I’ve found myself repeating the same maxim over and over again: Code is an essay written for two audiences: the computer, and your fellow programmers.

Consistent hashing was first proposed in 1997 by David Karger et al., and is used today in many large-scale data management systems, including (for example) Apache Cassandra.

Perlin noise can be used to create some interesting and fun visual effects, like the image below (click for high resolution): The above image was created by interpreting each point in 2D Perlin noise as an angle in a vector field, and then tracing particl…

Sometimes, the perfect version of something is too perfect.

Machine learning problems often require a kernel function that measures the similarity between two different input vectors, and .

Statistics and machine learning techniques for data smoothing have been around for a long time.

Mathematicians have been trying to figure out how to get computers to write proofs for a long time.

Might I interest you in a rousing game of Connect Four?

I’ve written a parser that does its best to parse invalid and malformed JSON.

While reviewing my database theory textbook, I stumbled across a few algorithms for relational schema decomposition and database normalization.

In many applications, such as a median filter, we want to sort a small () set of numbers.

Recently, I came across a problem in which I had to store contacts in an instant message application.