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Comment on Immutability Changes Everything (2016) [pdf]

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One of my favorite papers! This reminds me of Martin Kleppmann's work on Apache Samza and the idea of "turning the database inside out" by hosting the write-ahead log on something like Kafka and then having many different materialized views consume that log.

Seems like a very powerful architecture that is both simple and decouples many concerns.

In their 1992 Transaction Processing book*, Gray and Reuter extrapolate h/w and s/w trends forward and predict that the DBMS of their far future would look like a tape robot for backing store with materialised views in main memory.

Substitute streams for tape i/o, and this description of Samza sounds like it could be very similar to that vision.

* as far as I know, their exposition of the WAL and tradeoffs in its implementation has aged well. Any counter opinions?

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