"Transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities" by Martin Kleppmann
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a compact preview of Kleppmann's data systems material, including from his book on the subject.
What it is
Martin Kleppmann's Strange Loop talk on database transactions, covering why they were dropped by NoSQL, their reputation for being slow, and newer algorithms that make serializable transactions perform and scale. It touches on consistency, linearizability and the CAP theorem.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2018 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Recommends geksilla · 2018-04 · on “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”
Rich Hickey - "simple made easy" [LINK] Rob Pike - "concurrency is not parallelism" [LINK] Uncle Bob Martin - "future of programming" [LINK] Martin Kleppmann - "transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities" [this video] Simon Brown - "software architecture vs code" [LINK]
Recommends redisman · 2019-05 · on “Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into”
It's great. Incredibly dense with useful information and it just blows my mind how much knowledge Martin has about the topic. I recommend watching this talk from him to give a little glimpse of the book: [this video] This is just about a little part of one of the chapters.
Cites vvern · 2020-12 · on “Kafka Is Not a Database”
I mean, I hear you that people do that and it does allow you to avoid needing distributed transactions. When you're stuck with an underlying NoSQL database without transactions, this is the best thing you can do. This is the whole "invert the database" idea that ends up with [1]. I'm arguing that that usage pattern was painful and that if you can have horizontally scalable transaction processing and a stream of events due to committed transactions downstream, you can use that to power correct and easy to reason about materializations as well as asynchronous task processing. Transact to change state. React to state changes. Prosper. [1] [this video]
Cites gexaha · 2023-01 · on “UC Berkeley researchers set new visions for making CRDT data stores practical [pdf]”
jepsen.io has a neat diagram of various consistency models - [LINK] also, you can find talks of Martin Kleppmann on youtube about consistency guarantees, e. g., [this video]