database engines

The first lecture of Andy Pavlo's CMU 15-445 Intro to Database Systems (Fall 2019), covering course introduction and the relational model.

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and designer of Datomic, gives a JaxConf 2012 talk that takes apart traditional database architecture. He presents a different way to think about databases and explains the reasoning behind Datomic's fact-based design.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

Fox Business interview in which Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison claims Oracle will beat Amazon at cloud databases. He argues the world's valuable data lives in Oracle and says Amazon struggled to move off it.

Scott Manley explains rotating detonation engines, how they differ from pulsed detonation engines, and why thermodynamics predicts they beat traditional jet and rocket engines.

Mark Raasveldt of CWI presents DuckDB, an embeddable analytical database described as the SQLite for analytics, in a CMU Database Group talk. He explains why it was built, what it is for, and how it works.

SQLite creator Richard Hipp gives a history of SQLite and explains where it shines as a database at the edge of the network with no DBA. He covers long-term support, testing and how it is used in products.

Lukas Eder's Devoxx talk on how modern cost-based SQL optimizers rewrite and plan queries in ways developers would not expect. It argues that declarative SQL, used well, can run complex queries very fast.

A guest lecture Jon Gjengset gave at Two Sigma on using Rust for large, high-performance systems. It covers why Rust suits such projects, the Noria research database, a concurrent data structure used in it, and practical experience.

A 2006 Google TechTalk in which SQLite's author Richard Hipp introduces the embeddable, zero-configuration C database library. He covers its history, strengths and weaknesses, and where it beats client/server databases.

Engineering Explained argues that internal combustion engines are far from dead, and discusses the continued development of ICEs and the problems facing electric vehicles.

Database pioneer Michael Stonebraker argues that 'big data' is really at least four different problems: big volumes with small analytics, big analytics, velocity, and variety. He comments on where each market is heading.

Martin Kleppmann's Kafka Summit 2018 keynote asks whether Kafka can be considered a database. He covers event logs and related data-systems ideas.

Martin Odersky's JVM Language Summit 2015 talk argues that compilers can be thought of as databases. It describes design ideas for the Scala compiler and for developer tools.

Veritasium explains how jet engines run hotter than their components' melting points, using cooling air and single-crystal superalloy turbine blades. It covers how the blades are grown as aligned crystals.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

Martin Kleppmann argues that databases are global shared mutable state and proposes treating them as an ever-growing log of immutable facts. Derived data such as caches, indexes and views is then built by stream processors like Apache Samza. The talk draws on Kafka and LinkedIn's experience with commit logs.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session on how DynamoDB was built as a hyper-scale NoSQL database. It discloses underpinnings of the service and how it is run for over 100,000 customers.

Jon Gjengset's 2020 PhD dissertation presentation at MIT on partial state in dataflow-based materialized views, the idea behind the Noria database. The Q&A is cut out.

Everyday Astronaut explains the basic physics of rocket engines, the main engine cycles and fuel types, then compares SpaceX's methane-fueled full-flow staged combustion Raptor to other engines. It runs nearly 50 minutes with chapter markers.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

A BBC Four documentary following Alan Bond and Reaction Engines as they pursue the Skylon spaceplane and its SABRE engine. It covers the history from HOTOL and the heat-exchanger breakthrough.

A 10-minute clip from a Jonathan Blow Twitch stream in which he argues that game engines do not really need separate scripting languages. He questions the value of embedded interpreters when the main language can do the job.

Brian Bucklew of Freehold Games discusses design decisions behind Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood at IRDC 2015. The talk centers on data-driven, event-driven engine design.

Martin Fowler's GOTO 2012 introduction to NoSQL databases: where they came from, their data models, how consistency thinking differs, and when to use them. He argues they won't make relational databases obsolete and introduces polyglot persistence.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

Redis Labs and Tim Davis present RedisGraph, which uses GraphBLAS to treat graph queries in Cypher as sparse linear algebra for lower latency.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

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.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Michael Arntzenius's Strange Loop talk on Datafun, a functional query language that brings database-style querying into a general-purpose language. It discusses bridging database theory and programming languages.

Aaron Boodman of Replicache asks why sync engines have not yet fixed web app complexity and what is missing for them to go mainstream. The talk lays out the ideas that led to the Zero sync engine.

A Clojure/conj 2014 talk by Lucas Cavalcanti and Edward Wible on four uses of Datomic. They cover HTTP caching, audit trails, mobile database sync and authorization, drawing on the immutable transaction log.

Ahmon Dancy of Franz Inc explains low-level programming in Common Lisp, including off-heap data structures used in AllegroGraph to manage memory outside the garbage collector.

D. Richard Hipp's PGCon 2014 keynote on SQLite's relationship to PostgreSQL. He explains that SQLite was originally written from PostgreSQL 6.5 documentation and that the two engines serve different classes of problems.

A satirical animated dialogue in which a naive developer insists MongoDB is web scale while a database expert mocks him. It parodies the NoSQL versus relational debate.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

A hobbyist build-and-experiment video on rotating detonation engines (RDEs), where a continuous detonation wave spins around an annular chamber. The creator 3D prints parts and tests a small engine, while being candid about uncertainty over whether a true rotating wave was achieved.

A short claymation music video by animator savannahXYZ satirizing how bad web search has become, with SEO spam and ads crowding out real answers. It is comedic rather than analytical.