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I've watched some of these and the material and teacher are awesome. Two questions come to mind:

1. A ton of effort seems to be spent on making things run in parallel, but that introduces quite a bit of overhead too, so how well does a sequential baseline actually perform? By sequential baseline I mean a single thread that just executes all incoming transactions one by one in sequence.

2. This course seems to spend a lot of time on things that the teacher says are things you shouldn't do anyway. For instance there is an entire lecture on skip lists and Bw-trees, and at the end the teacher mentions that these are terrible. This is interesting from a historical perspective, but not only does this take a lot of time, I also lose track of which things you should and which things you shouldn't do. It'd be interesting to have a compressed course that spends less time on things you should not do, perhaps by adding annotations to the video to skip sections that are about things you should not do.



A ton of effort seems to be spent on making things run in parallel, but that introduces quite a bit of overhead too, so how well does a sequential baseline actually perform? By sequential baseline I mean a single thread that just executes all incoming transactions one by one in sequence.

You should check out the H-Store research project[1] and its commercial successor VoltDB. They’re basically a study in how much you can win with a federation of single-threaded database systems.

[1] https://hstore.cs.brown.edu/papers/hstore-endofera.pdf


Do you have the link to lecture on SkipLists and Bw Trees?

Thanks


Lecture 7.




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