There is a flood of papers out there with unrepeatable processes. Where can you find quality papers to read?
Most of the stuff I read isn't "your SAAS app should have atomic clocks" and more "here's some maths on why it works, here's some explanation of what we were going for, here's some pseudocode".
I’m familiar with the concept wrt mathematics(in particular in the context of ulter-a-filters as my favorite professor would say it), but I don’t see the necessity in most CS research.
Or have I completely missed the point of your question..?
A year of two ago I read Ralph Kimball’s seminal The Data Warehouse Toolkit. While I could see why it’s still often recommended, it was showing its age in many ways (though a fair bit older than DDIA). It felt like a mix of best practices and dated advice, but it was hard to tell for certain what was what.
It's not really a book about 'best practices', despite the name. It's more like an encyclopaedia, covering every approach out there, putting them in context, linking to copious reference papers, and talking about their properties on a very conceptual and practical level. It's not really like 'hey use this database vendor!!!'.
Most of that research is decades old. I specifically remember Lamport timestamps. Not only has that held up, it's unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon. Most topics covered are as fundamental as the two generals problem; almost philosophical.
No database vendor can solve the issues around two concurrently existing write masters. Sync will be necessary, conflicts will occur. A concrete vendor could only hope to make that less painful (CRDTs for automatic conflict resolution, ...). That's kind of the level that book operates at.
Hmm. The techniques used today were invented in the 1970s-80s.
Any advice how to approach this?
https://twitter.com/DominikTornow
https://twitter.com/jorandirkgreef
https://twitter.com/JungleSilicon
You can also follow me. Not saying I'm cool but I do re-tweet cool people:
For example in the world of engines, Heywood is basically god: (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=John...) has 29k citations!
"Network partitioning can completely destroy mutual consistency in the worst case, and this fact has led to a certain amount of restrictiveness, vagueness, and even nervousness in past discussions, of how it may be handled"
https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/739/Fall2015/Papers...
But as a general starting point, all roads seem to lead to Lamport 78 (Time, Clocks). If you have a specific area of interest I or others might be able to point you in the right direction.
- Designing Data Intensive Applicatons. Great overview of... basically everything, and every chapter has dozens of references. Can't recommend it enough.
- Read papers. I've had lots of a-ha moments going to wikipedia and looking up the oldest paper on a topic (wtf was in the water in Massachusetts in the 70s..). Yes they're challenging, no they're not impossible if you have a compsci undergrad equivalent level of knowledge.
- Try and build toy systems. Built out some small and trivial implementations of CRDTs here https://lewiscampbell.tech/sync.html, mainly be reading the papers. They're subtle but they're not rocket science - mere mortals can do this if they apply themselves!
- Follow cool people in the field. Tigerbeetle stands out to me despite sitting at the opposite end of the consistency/availability corner where I've made my nest. They really are poring over applied dist sys papers and implementing it. I joke that Joran is a dangerous man to listen to because his talks can send you down rabbit-holes and you begin to think maybe he isn't insane for writing his own storage layer..
- Did I mention read papers? Seriously, the research of the smartest people on planet earth are on the internet, available for your consumption, for free. Take a moment to reflect in how incredible that is. Anyone anywhere on planet earth can git gud if they apply themselves.