Murat (Distributolog)
LightNews LightNews
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
Murat (Distributolog)
@muratdemirbas.bsky.social
1.6K followers 61 following 120 posts
Distributed systems,Database systems, Lightweight formal methods, TLA+

https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
bgrueskin.bsky.social
Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…
November 9, 2025 at 8:49 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Taurus MM: A Cloud-Native Shared-Storage Multi-Master Database

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/taur...
Taurus MM: A Cloud-Native Shared-Storage Multi-Master Database
This VLDB'23 paper presents Taurus MM, Huawei's cloud-native, multi-master OLTP database built to scale write throughput in clusters betwee...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
November 10, 2025 at 4:36 AM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
tedherman.bsky.social
@matsuzawa.bsky.social www.wsj.com/lifestyle/fo...
Fountain Pens Are More Popular Than Ever—and Purists Are Fuming
Chinese knockoffs are flooding the market, shaking up the community of enthusiasts still devoted to the old-timey instruments
www.wsj.com
November 9, 2025 at 1:16 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Taurus Database: How to be Fast, Available, and Frugal in the Cloud

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/taur...
Taurus Database: How to be Fast, Available, and Frugal in the Cloud
This SIGMOD’20 paper presents TaurusDB, Huawei's disaggregated MySQL-based cloud database. TaurusDB refines the disaggregated architecture ...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
November 9, 2025 at 4:41 AM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

TLA+ Modeling of AWS outage DNS race condition

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/11/tla-...
TLA+ Modeling of AWS outage DNS race condition
On Oct 19–20, 2025, AWS’s N. Virginia region suffered a major DynamoDB outage triggered by a DNS automation defect that broke endpoint resol...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
November 5, 2025 at 10:48 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
zicklag.dev
I love the point made here.

We actually _need_ to do the work, and feel the pain, of our existing situation to be motivated to understand and fix it.

I think often times we don't understand how important our suffering is to a victory that actually matters.

"Beware of unearned wisdom" - Carl Jung
Can clear insights distill without dust, tear, and sweat? One may argue that with machines handling the grunt work, the researchers would finally get more time for thinking. Our brains are --what?-- yes, lazy. Left idle, they will scroll Reddit/Twitter rather than solve concurrency bugs. I suspect we need some friction/irritation to nudge us to think in the background. And I suspect this is what happens when we are doing the boring work and working in the trenches. While writing a similar code snippet for the fifth time in our codebase, an optimization opportunity or an abstraction would occur to us. Very hard problems are impossible to tackle head on. Doing the legwork, I suspect we approach the problem sideways, and have a chance to make some leeway. Yes, doing evaluation work sucks. But it is often necessary to generate the friction and space to get you think about the performance, and more importantly the logic/point of your system. Through that suffering, you gradually get transformed and enlightened. Working in the trenches, you may even realize your entire setup is flawed, and your measurements are garbage due to using closed loop clients instead of open loop ones. What happens when we stop getting our hands dirty? We risk distilling nothing at all. Insights don't bubble up while we are sitting in comfort and scrolling cat videos. In an earlier post, Looming Liability Machines (LLMs), I argued that offloading root-cause analysis to AI misses the point. RCA isn't about assigning blame to a component. It is an opportunity to think about the system holistically, and understand it better, and improve. Outsourcing this to LLMs strike me as a very stupid thing to do. We need to keep exercising those muscles, otherwise they would atrophy alongside our understanding of the system.
October 23, 2025 at 1:53 AM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/barb...
Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research
This recent paper from the Berkeley Sky Computing Lab has been making waves in systems community. Of course, Aleksey and I did our live blin...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
October 23, 2025 at 12:15 AM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
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...
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
October 10, 2025 at 5:32 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Tiga: Accelerating Geo-Distributed Transactions with Synchronized Clocks

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/tiga...
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
October 8, 2025 at 3:26 AM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
emptysqua.re
My review of a classic of Argentine sci-fi comics, now a Netflix series in Spanish. emptysqua.re/blog/the-ete...
Versions of The Eternaut
A classic of Argentine sci-fi comics, now a Netflix series in Spanish.
emptysqua.re
October 7, 2025 at 2:20 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
emptysqua.re
Kelsey Roman performing with aerial silks hanging from the West Trapps cliff in the Gunks, at sunset and moonrise. emptysqua.re/blog/aerial-...
October 7, 2025 at 5:22 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

The Invisible Curriculum of Research

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
October 3, 2025 at 8:11 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
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.
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
September 24, 2025 at 7:00 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

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

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/supp...
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
September 17, 2025 at 5:28 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Disaggregation: A New Architecture for Cloud Databases

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/disa...
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
September 8, 2025 at 9:26 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Our Myrtle Beach vacation

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/myrt...
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
September 8, 2025 at 1:09 AM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
pvldb.bsky.social
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
Thumbnail: HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication
August 1, 2025 at 6:00 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Recent Reads (September 25)

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/rece...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
September 3, 2025 at 5:23 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Asymmetric Linearizable Local Reads

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/09/asym...
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
September 2, 2025 at 3:59 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
pvldb.bsky.social
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
Thumbnail: Design and Modular Verification of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB
September 1, 2025 at 6:00 AM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
emptysqua.re
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.
pvldb.bsky.social PVLDB @pvldb.bsky.social · Sep 1
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
Thumbnail: Design and Modular Verification of Distributed Transactions in MongoDB
September 1, 2025 at 6:43 AM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
andypavlo.bsky.social
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
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...
15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu
August 25, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
emptysqua.re
The epic continues: emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, Part 2
Graph theory and epistemology, oh my!
emptysqua.re
August 25, 2025 at 2:48 PM
muratdemirbas.bsky.social
[new blog post]

Cabinet: Dynamically Weighted Consensus Made Fast

muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/08/cabi...
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...
muratbuffalo.blogspot.com
August 21, 2025 at 2:03 AM
Reposted by Murat (Distributolog)
emptysqua.re
I'm beginning an epic journey to understand the 1990 paper "Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment" emptysqua.re/blog/review-...
Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, Part 1
A profound 1990 paper about epistomology in distributed systems.
emptysqua.re
August 13, 2025 at 4:49 PM