http://queue.acm.org/Curmudgeon http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=3325132 Cross-component tracing is a way to solve the problem of reference cycles across component boundaries. This problem appears as soon as components can form arbitrary object graphs with nontrivial ownership across API boundaries. An incremental version of CCT is implemented in V8 and Blink, enabling effective and efficient reclamation of memory in a safe manner. Tue, 09 Apr 2019 15:33:59 GMT 3325132 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=3323993 As leader of the team, you have significant influence over your team's culture. You can institute policies and procedures that help make your team happy and productive, monitor team successes, and continually improve the team. Another important part of team culture, however, is helping people feel they are a part of creating it. How can you expand the job of creating a culture to other team members? Wed, 03 Apr 2019 11:20:49 GMT 3323993 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=3321612 Support for distributed transactions across heterogeneous storage technologies is either nonexistent or suffers from poor operational and performance characteristics. In contrast, OLEP is increasingly used to provide good performance and strong consistency guarantees in such settings. In data systems it is very common for logs to be used as internal implementation details. The OLEP approach is different: it uses event logs, rather than transactions, as the primary application programming model for data management. Traditional databases are still used, but their writes come from a log rather than directly from the application. The use of OLEP is not simply pragmatism on the part of developers, but rather it offers a number of advantages. Consequently, OLEP is expected to be increasingly used to provide strong consistency in large-scale systems that use heterogeneous storage technologies. Sun, 24 Mar 2019 16:42:54 GMT 3321612 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=3320268 In February 2004, with the other members of the Queue editorial board, I was at our monthly in-person dinner meeting, where we gather to come up with interesting discussion topics that will result in practitioner-oriented articles (and the best authors to write them) for publication in Queue. It was only our second year in business, and although we had published some successful and widely read articles, Queue still had no regular columnists. I was initially invited to board meetings by another editorial board member, Eric Allman, and had written a couple of articles for the publication. I was also co-authoring my first book but had never been a columnist. Although the concept seemed appealing at the time, perhaps due to too much wine with dinner, I was at a loss on how to actually make it work. Mon, 18 Mar 2019 12:12:18 GMT 3320268 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=3319534 Provably neutral clouds are undoubtedly a viable solution to blockchain scaling. By optimizing the transport layer, not only can the throughput be fundamentally scaled up, but the latency could be dramatically reduced. Indeed, the latency distribution in today's data centers is already biased toward microsecond timescales for most of the flows, with millisecond timescales residing only at the tail of the distribution. There is no reason why a BDN point of presence would not be able to achieve a similar performance. Adding dedicated optical infrastructure among such BDN points of presence would further alleviate throughput and reduce latency, creating the backbone of an advanced BDN. The key to this vision, however, lies in establishing trust by the blockchain ecosystem into the underlying networking infrastructure. This, in turn, is achieved by decoupling authority from infrastructure via a provably neutral network design. Tue, 12 Mar 2019 13:26:00 GMT 3319534 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=3317289 The CIDR (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research) runs once every two years, and luckily for us 2019 is one of those years. I've selected two papers from this year's conference that highlight bold and exciting directions for data systems. Thu, 28 Feb 2019 14:04:58 GMT 3317289