Paper-reading

Database schema evolution (DDL) poses unique challenges in ensuring concurrency with transactions while maintaining ACID properties. Traditional approaches use metadata locks (MDLs) to serialize DDL and DML/DQL, but this can severely impact performance. This blog discusses the issues and explores solutions like multi-version concurrency control to enable highly concurrent non-blocking schema changes.

This blog post explores the fascinating interplay between Hybrid Logical Clocks (HLC) and Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) in enabling distributed transactions in CockroachDB. It covers how HLC addresses causality issues and how MVCC handles concurrency conflicts in a distributed setting.

This document analyzes the distributed transaction protocol used in Percolator, a system for large-scale incremental processing deployed by Google. Percolator extends Bigtable to provide multi-row ACID transactions through a standard two-phase commit protocol.

In this post, I analyze several key design aspects of the Google File System presented in the original paper. I discuss the assumptions GFS made regarding workload characteristics and how that informed choices.