It's time to pick up our series on consistency and replication again. See consistency tag for the previous paper reviews on the topic.

I had thought I could live a happy life as a database engineer, and eventually retire, without ever having to actually read any literature on Paxos.

How did it start?

Parkinson's disease develops slowly, we don't know what causes it, and it can't be stopped. But for most patients, the key word is slowly.

Apparently a common early symptom is a weakened sense of smells. I had that since my teenage years. I just thought it was because I was allergic a lot.

If you work in a tech startup, you probably have some options. If you work(ed) at a successful startup, you know that when the day comes that you exercise and sell your options, you get to pay income tax on the difference between the low strike price you paid vs the high market price the stock are actually worth.

There's a Swedish jazz sång, originally performed by Monica Zetterlund, that I find beautiful.

Sakta vi gå genom stan. (Beppe Wolgers, Roy Turk and Fred E. Ahlert, 1961)

The song is about a couple walking home, through the streets of Stockholm, in a bright summer night.

As I started at Datastax in June of the past year, I also swinged back from being an IC engineer to being an engineering manager. This is a common topic to blog about, see for example Adam Comerford and Charity Majors.

One thing that struck me when reading up on Cassandra is that there is a very strong mindset in the Cassandra community around linear scalability and therefore on primary key based data models. So de-normalizing your data, such as by using materialized views is considered a best practice.

However, de-normalization has some challenges of its own. Both Cassandra-managed materialized views or any other application side managed denormalization run the risk of becoming inconsistent. And of course it does mean you're multiplying your database size.

While most focus in Cassandra world is on the upcoming 4.0 release, or perhaps on our project to add JSON and GraphQL APIs to Cassandra, a feature that excites me personally is much more fundamental and at the core of th

The Open Source Initiative recently organized its first conference: State of the Source 2020. I presented a talk In Defense of Extreme Copyleft, where I explored the boundaries of current network copyleft licenses and potential need for further - carefully deliberated - expansion of copyleft licensing.