new post: the senior engineer death spiral sunilpai.dev/posts/the-senio… a friend just started a big job and asked for some advice. so I braindumped a monologue about a super common failure mode I see with engineers and posted it here, hope it helps whoever it can.

It's like posting a go-cart to his race car, but I'm pretty proud of me little rack.

If a neighbor said "I am working on something that has a greater than 10% chance of killing my kids before they graduate from high school" you would call child protective services -- and if they said that it might also actually kill the entire school, you would call the police.

Good paper. transaction log\WAL storage for OLTP databases doesn't belong in S3 (for datalakes... maybe?). The design proposed in the paper is very similar to the HorizonDB WAL server.

There is a lot of hype around putting the WAL on object storage. However, for low-latency systems, e.g. OLTP databases, object storage is a suboptimal primitive for the WAL: (1) PUTs are expensive for small WAL writes [bytes/$]. (2) Object stores are optimized for throughput, not latency, with write latencies often around 10-50 ms. Because every transaction must wait for its WAL record to become durable, every transaction inherits that latency. This points to a missing storage primitive. In our (@maxikuschewski @melhindiCS @viktor_leis) latest accepted research paper at VLDB, we looked at how to close that gap.