Murat (Distributolog)

Academic chat: On PhD This week, Aleksey and I met not to dissect a research paper, but to chat about "the process of PhD". I had recently wrote a post titled "T...

Academic chat: On PhD

This week, Aleksey and I didn’t dissect a paper, we talked about the process of doing a PhD:

the 5 Cs of research,

how taste develops,

why sparring matters,

what academia can learn from industry's onboarding process!

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/acad...

Tiga: Accelerating Geo-Distributed Transactions with Synchronized Clocks This paper (to appear at SOSP'25) is one of the latest efforts exploring the dream of a one-round commit for geo-replicated databases. TAPI...

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Tiga: Accelerating Geo-Distributed Transactions with Synchronized Clocks

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/tiga...

Versions of The Eternaut A classic of Argentine sci-fi comics, now a Netflix series in Spanish.

My review of a classic of Argentine sci-fi comics, now a Netflix series in Spanish. emptysqua.re/blog/the-ete...

Kelsey Roman performing with aerial silks hanging from the West Trapps cliff in the Gunks, at sunset and moonrise. emptysqua.re/blog/aerial-...

The Invisible Curriculum of Research Courses, textbooks, and papers provide the formal curriculum of research. But there is also an invisible curriculum. Unwritten rules and ski...

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The Invisible Curriculum of Research

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

Four Ivies. Two days. This is my long-overdue trip report from last summer: July 10–11, 2024. We toured Ivy League campuses to help our rising senior son weigh hi...

Four Ivies. Two Days.

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/four...

This is my long-overdue trip report from last summer. For campus visits, we toured Yale and Brown, followed by Princeton and UPenn the next day. Of course we drove, that's how we roll.

This time we got to rank the schools.

Supporting our AI overlords: Redesigning data systems to be Agent-first This Berkeley systems group paper opens with the thesis that LLM agents will soon dominate data system workloads. These agents, acting on b...

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Supporting our AI overlords: Redesigning data systems to be Agent-first

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/supp...

Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases This short VLDB'25 paper  surveys disaggregation for cloud databases. It has several insightful points, and I found it worth summarizing.  T...

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Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/disa...

Our Myrtle Beach vacation This year was a bastard. Not from work. God, no, I find work relaxing. Reading papers, inventing algorithms, ripping apart distributed syste...

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Our Myrtle Beach vacation

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/myrt...

Thumbnail: HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication

Vol:18 No:8 → HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication
👥 Authors: Zhiying Liang, Vahab Jabrayilov, Abutalib Aghayev, Aleksey Charapko
📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p2505-charapko.pdf

Many books in discworld, but are you referring to maybe another miniseries about "Om"?
I am not that well-versed about the Pratchett's universe yet.

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Recent Reads (September 25)

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/rece...

Asymmetric Linearizable Local Reads People want data fast. They also want it consistent. Those two wants pull in opposite directions. This VLDB'25 paper does another take on t...

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Asymmetric Linearizable Local Reads

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/asym...

Thumbnail: Design and Modular Verification of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB

Vol:18 No:12 → Design and Modular Verification of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB
👥 Authors: William Schultz, Murat Demirbas
📄 PDF: https://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol18/p5045-schultz.pdf

VLDB has published my colleagues' terrific paper MongoDB distributed transactions: how they work, how we checked them with TLA+, how we checked that our code conforms to our TLA+ spec.

CMU 15-445/645 :: Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2025) You want to know whether this is the premier course at Carnegie Mellon University on the design and implementation of database management systems? Well, it is. This course rips through data models (re...

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, Part 2 Graph theory and epistemology, oh my!

The epic continues: emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

Cabinet: Dynamically Weighted Consensus Made Fast This paper (to appear in VLDB'25) proposes a consensus algorithm called "Cabinet", which dynamically adjusts node weights based on responsi...

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Cabinet: Dynamically Weighted Consensus Made Fast

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/cabi...

Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, Part 1 A profound 1990 paper about epistomology in distributed systems.

I'm beginning an epic journey to understand the 1990 paper "Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment" emptysqua.re/blog/review-...

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Vive la Difference: Practical Diff Testing of Stateful Applications (VLDB'25)

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/vive...

Safe rollouts of stateful apps. Instantly branches Postgres DBs, replays prod-like requests on old & new versions, and shows 3-way diffs of outputs + DB state.

Towards Optimal Transaction Scheduling This paper (VLDB'2024) looks at boosting transaction throughput through better scheduling. The idea is to explore the schedule-space more s...

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Towards Optimal Transaction Scheduling (VLDB'24)

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/towa...

🏆 Winners of the first-ever #ai meets #tlaplus challenge:

🥇 From code to TLA+ specs, automatically.
🥈 Grammar-constrained AI that speaks TLA+.
🥉 Generating correct Rust from TLA+ specs.

Full details 👉 foundation.tlapl.us/challenge

Neurosymbolic AI: The 3rd Wave The paper (arXiv 2020, also AI review 2023) opens up with discussing recent high-profile AI debates: the Montréal AI Debate and the AAAI 20...

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Neurosymbolic AI: The 3rd Wave

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/neur...

Neurosymbolic AI: Why, What, and How The paper (2023) argues for integrating two historically divergent traditions in artificial intelligence (neural networks and symbolic reas...

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Neurosymbolic AI: Why, What, and How

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/neur...

Can a Client–Server Cache Tango Accelerate Disaggregated Storage? This paper from HotStorage'25 presents OrcaCache, a design proposal for a coordinated caching framework tailored to disaggregated storage s...

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Can a Client–Server Cache Tango Accelerate Disaggregated Storage?

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/can-...

Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores This paper from SIGMOD 2016 proposes a transaction healing approach to improve the scalability of Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) in m...

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Transaction Healing: Scaling Optimistic Concurrency Control on Multicores

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/tran...

Analysing Snapshot Isolation This paper (PODC'2016) presents a clean and declarative treatment of Snapshot Isolation (SI) using dependency graphs. It builds on the foun...

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Analysing Snapshot Isolation

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/anal...

Recent reads (July 2025) I know I should call this recent listens, but I am stuck with the series name. So here it goes. These are some recent "reads" this month. B...

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Recent Reads (July 2025)

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/rece...

Real Life Is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too! Aleksey and I sat down to read this paper on Monday night. This was an experiment which aimed to share how experts read papers in real tim...

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Real Life Is Uncertain. Consensus Should Be Too! (HotOS'25)

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/real...

Aleksey and I recorded our reading/discussion section. It is also available through the blog post, and is instructive for how to read papers.

Tired

Using callbacks to implement non-blocking I/O

Wired

Using callbacks to implement partial re-execution of transactions that violate serializability, avoiding full aborts

bsky.app/profile/mura...