Speaker: Michael Cahill
Location: Soda 510
Date: September 13th, 2024
Time: 12pm-1pm PDT
Title: Why are we still talking about transactions? Or, why didn’t my company implement my research?
Abstract:
This talk will cover research and industry practice in the design and implementation of transaction processing systems. Despite over 50 years of history, transaction processing remains an active field of research, including concurrency control protocols, approaches to scaling a distributed DBMS, and programming models. By contrasting my research on serializable isolation with my industry experience contributing to MongoDB’s approach to distributed transactions, I will reflect on why the database community continues to explore this design space.
Bio:
Michael Cahill joined the School of Computer Science at the University of Sydney as a Professor of Practice in 2024. He was a founder of storage engine startup WiredTiger then VP Engineering for Storage at MongoDB. Prior to that, Michael was an architect of Berkeley DB at Sleepycat Software and Oracle, responsible for design and implementation of multi-version concurrency control. Michael’s PhD from the University of Sydney is in the area of transaction processing and concurrency control. His work on a new algorithm for implementing serializable isolation received an ACM SIGMOD Best Paper and Test of Time Award and was added to PostgreSQL 9.1.