South Bay Systems returns for its April meetup on the 30th. This time we have @cliffclick.bsky.social giving a walkthrough of his teaching language for Sea of Nodes!
Sign up now! luma.com/nnq9aq27
The recording from the last talk is up!
youtu.be/TeFsBVIYBis
If you're an RSS user and a South Bay Systems attendee, I've added an RSS feed for the events at southbaysystems.xyz/...
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.
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
There's a few papers which argue that DBMSs do page eviction wrong, and they always feel like incredibly compelling arguments. As a bonus, "Writeback-Aware Caching" pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/... points out that evicting a dirty page is more expensive than evicting a clean page.
[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).
I continue to have a weakness for papers that show B-Trees and LSM-Trees as just two opposite tradeoffs along a continuum.
[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.
Thumbnail: Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems
Vol:19 No:3 → Tux: Efficient Drop-in Networking for Database Systems
👥 Authors: Xinjing Zhou, Viktor Leis, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker
📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol19/p334-zhou.pdf
[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.
[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....
usefulfictions.substack.com/p/burnout-is... has had me thinking a lot about what is “rewarding“ work and trying to separate “I should be doing this to achieve things I want to have done” vs “I enjoy this”
[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.
I think scour.ing/@linearizabl... or scour.ing/feed/https:%... should work for the likes
@emschwartz.me has been super responsive to feedback about improving the signal to noise ratio too! :) There's already been a couple great rounds of adjustments, and I look forward to the continued refinement
https://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.
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 🤞
Sitting down with a coding agent and Kuzu/ladybugdb to understand how factorized representations work at the code level across query processing is worth the time and effort
“The Manga Guide to Databases” fits the criteria for sure
(Which I think I’ve seen you show you have a copy of it already.)
ladybugdb.com is the fork & continue project, but I think there’s a slightly different roadmap to be more object storage integrated
Turns out the rumor of this being an Apple acquisition was actually true: appleinsider.com/articles/26/...
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?
One of our recordings had spotty audio because the presenter would step to the side while talking to gesture at slides. Would that also then mean they’d step out of line for a shotgun mic? I have no idea how precisely directional those actually are.
I’m willing to spend the money, I just know nothing about audio equipment. If you have some audio gadget friend to give a trusted answer for “what type of microphone and which product should I go buy for this?” that’d be great. I think I can borrow a cheap lapel mic as a test to see if that’s good.
A 2026 hope of mine is to get our own recording setup figured out so that we can more reliably get recordings up. We’ve been about 50/50, and I feel bad for the speakers when they come give a great talk, but then the recording doesn’t work out for whatever reason. (Like the Morel and QOaaS talks 😢)
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
