Distributed Algorithms in NoSQL Databases

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Highly Scalable Blog

Scalability is one of the main drivers of the NoSQL movement. As such, it encompasses distributed system coordination, failover, resource management and many other capabilities. It sounds like a big umbrella, and it is. Although it can hardly be said that NoSQL movement brought fundamentally new techniques into distributed data processing, it triggered an avalanche of practical studies and real-life trials of different combinations of protocols and algorithms. These developments gradually highlight a system of relevant database building blocks with proven practical efficiency. In this article I’m trying to provide more or less systematic description of techniques related to distributed operations in NoSQL databases.

In the rest of this article we study a number of distributed activities like replication of failure detection that could happen in a database. These activities, highlighted in bold below, are grouped into three major sections:

  • Data Consistency. Historically, NoSQL paid a lot of attention to…

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Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

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the morning paper

Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly Haas et al., PLDI 2017

This is a joint paper from authors at Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple describing the motivations for WebAssembly together with a very concise exposition of its core semantics. If you’re following along with the paper, I found it helpful to dip into the full WebAssembly Specification at points for extra clarification. I’m going to spend most of my time in this write-up covering the parts of the paper focusing on the design rationale, properties, and implementation experiences since diving into the detailed semantics is really better left to the full spec.

Why do we need WebAssembly?

There’s a great observation in the introduction section: the Web has become the most ubiquitous application platform ever, and yet by historical accident the only natively supported programming language for that platform is JavaScript! That’s made for a number of…

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