[arXiv] Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP arxiv.org/abs/2607.1... It's a DSQL paper, hot off the presses! Query processing in firecracker! Erasure coding on logs! The origin story of the turmoil crate! All cool stuff! Can't sneak an arXiv upload past me, Marc. :p

[VLDB '24] X-Stor: A Cloud-native NoSQL Database Service with Multi-model Support www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... Aside from the "everything can be implemented on top of a wide column store", there's a surprisingly detailed discussion of implementing modern multitenancy.

[ATC'22] DepFast: Orchestrating Code of Quorum Systems www.usenix.org/confe... Quorum objects make for clean code. I really appreciate these "how to write distsys code in more correct and manageable ways" papers.

[arXiv] Beyond Chunk-Then-Embed arxiv.org/abs/2602.1... I had assumed that, when chunking (large) documents for embedding, adding context about the document to the chunk would always be superior, and it was interesting to see that's not *always* the case.

[arXiv] Beyond Cosine Similarity arxiv.org/abs/2602.0... I almost always see cosine, and it was interesting to read about similarity metrics as classes of more and less restrictive similarity measures.

Achievement unlocked (From “How to write to SSDs” arxiv.org/pdf/2603.09927)

[CIDR '25] Linear Elastic Caching via Ski Rental www.vldb.org/cidrdb/... You should consider that holding a page in cache costs you, because RAM itself is expensive, and existing page replacement algorithms look at sizing cache independently (via miss-ratio curves).

[arXiv] Dynamic read & write optimization with TurtleKV arxiv.org/pdf/2509.1... TurtleKV shows a way to elastically move around the RUM conjecture space depending on what is important at the moment.

[VLDB '26] Garnet: A Next-Generation Cache-Store for Accelerating Applications and Services www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... It's fast, durable redis, brought to you by Badrish Chandramouli (et. al), known for other 🔥 work like FASTER and Bf-tree.

[CIDR '25] Adaptive Factorization Using Linear-Chained Hash Tables vldb.org/cidrdb/pape... Adaptive execution + factorization + WCOJ = great paper. The best intro to factorized databases I know of is www.youtube.com/watc....

[VLDB '25] MD-MVCC: Multi-version Concurrency Control for Schema Changes in Azure SQL Database www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... A great discussion of the end-to-end impact of allowing multiple versions of schema metadata information to be live concurrently, in a real, production system.

I’ve recently seen multiple, unrelated instances of people referencing Bf-trees. Good job, @benjdd.com.

[PVLDB] Enhancing Transaction Processing through Indirection Skipping www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... Whereas VMCache improve pointer swizzing's complexity by removing the swizzling, this work points out that page and frame hints are highly effective, and okay if they're wrong.

[ASPLOS'25] Fusion: An Analytics Object Store Optimized for Query Pushdown www.cs.princeton.edu... Tightly integrating an Iceberg catalog with an object store means that one could make file-format aware erasure coding decisions, to permit pushing down filters and aggregations.

[VLDB] Towards Principled, Practical Document Database Design www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... If you've ever wished that there was a document database equivalent for relational databases' 3NF-style schema design guidance, then this is the paper for you.

Even as a disliker of YouTube videos as a way to learn things, I found www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XmJ... easier to understand than the paper www.cs.ox.ac.uk/dan.olteanu/... for factorized database work Extending SQL to Return a Subdatabase dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1... also seems related?

[arXiv] On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval arxiv.org/abs/2508.2... It's impossible to retrieve all combinations of pairs of documents post-embedding. Thus, there's usecases that vector search won't do well at. Conversely, BM25 excels in these cases.

[VLDB] NaviX: A Native Vector Index Design for Graph DBMSs With Robust Predicate-Agnostic Search Performance www.vldb.org/pvldb/v... It feels like a follow-on/improvement to ACORN. Also interesting to see HNSW built directly on a graph database working well.

Philz funding round vs post-money valuation history isn’t looking too great

Not only did GaussDB run TPC-C wrong (without stating so!), they gave cockroach a capitalized R. > We compared the end-to-end performance of GaussDB with System-X and CockRoachDB on TPC-C with 10,000 warehouses.

In line with previous research [16, 29], we set the think/keying time in TPC-C to zero.

Success!

I'm getting tired of these new paper announcements on LinkedIn which are like

[arXiv] TreeTracker Join: Simple, Optimal, Fast arxiv.org/abs/2403.0... TreeTracker gives a very simple breakdown of what the core differences are between a naive binary join and an optimal multi-way join.

[EDBT'22] Integrating the Orca Optimizer into MySQL openproceedings.org/... Huawei Taurus folk plugged Orca into MySQL to get a better query optimizer for OLAP queries in MySQL.

Wisdom on btree prefix compression from someone who has implemented and benchmarked it. From lobste.rs/s/za4cxl/b...