No #fosdem for me this year, so I spend the weekend catching up on some papers that Andy Pavlo mentioned turing a talk last year at p99 conf.

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol17/p2115-leis.pdf

https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol16/p3335-butrovich.pdf

From one side, there is a commercially driven push from cloud providers to treat databases similarly to any other stateless system. However, in reality, it’s not that straightforward.

Meanwhile, some parts of academia are moving in a different direction—bypassing OS abstractions and moving user-land operations to the Kernel, such as eBPF. This is a tricky move since it implies that other abstractions like kernel resource management won’t be as useful in this context.

If you walk far enough in one direction, you’ll return to where you started. If successful, this approach feels like we’re moving toward big, powerful machines running high-performance transactional databases with satellite applications, kind of like BigIron all over again.

It’s a long short, but if assume this works. who wins in this scenario? not AWS or Azure for sure. Image

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