distributed system
Design of Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines
How VMware designed fault-tolerant virtual machines using primary-backup replication, deterministic replay, and failure detection.
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18 notes on databases, distributed systems, concurrency, and backend engineering.
distributed system
The Google File System - Case Study
A case study of Google File System architecture, including its master, chunkservers, consistency model, and fault-tolerance choices.
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Pessimistic Concurrency Control - 2PL
How pessimistic concurrency control and two-phase locking coordinate database transactions while preserving correctness.
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Query Optimization
How database optimizers transform declarative SQL into efficient plans using heuristics, cost models, and search strategies.
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Query Execution - Joins
A practical tour of database join execution, including nested-loop, block nested-loop, index, sort-merge, and hash joins.
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Query Execution - Aggregations
How database engines execute sorting, hashing, grouping, and aggregation operations efficiently when data exceeds available memory.
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Understanding hash indexes
How database hash indexes avoid linear scans, organize buckets, handle collisions, and support efficient equality lookups.
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Database Buffer Pool - Part 2
A closer look at database buffer replacement policies, including LRU, clock algorithms, and workload-aware memory management.
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Database Buffer Pool - Part 1
How database buffer pools move pages between disk and memory, reduce expensive I/O, and support efficient query execution.
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Compression In Databases
How database compression reduces I/O, including encoding techniques, execution tradeoffs, and the importance of preserving data fidelity.
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Storage Models for Databases
How row, column, and hybrid database storage models serve different OLTP and OLAP workloads and I/O access patterns.
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What the heck is OLTP, OLAP?
A clear comparison of OLTP and OLAP database workloads, including transaction patterns, analytical queries, and system design tradeoffs.
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Quorum Consensus
How quorum consensus balances consistency and availability in distributed systems through configurable read and write quorums.
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Deadlock prevention & necessary conditions to occur
The necessary conditions for deadlock, how deadlocks differ from livelocks and starvation, and practical strategies for prevention.
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Mesa VS Hoare semantics
A comparison of Mesa and Hoare monitor semantics, condition variables, and the synchronization guarantees each model provides.
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An introduction to OAuth 2.0
An introduction to OAuth 2.0, why delegated authorization exists, and how applications securely request limited access to user resources.
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Thread Implementation & Modeling
How operating systems implement and model kernel threads, user threads, and hybrid threading approaches, with their core tradeoffs.
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Thread Abstraction
An introduction to thread abstraction, concurrency, process address spaces, execution state, and why operating systems use threads.
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