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"Transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities" by Martin Kleppmann

46 videos recommended on HN
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2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2018–2023 score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as a compact preview of Kleppmann's data systems material, including from his book on the subject.

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.

“I recommend watching this talk from him to give a little glimpse of the book” (HN, 2019)

2 recommendations · 2 citations · Talks · intermediate

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@geksilla Apr 2018 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Kleppmann talk on transactions, listed among favorite tech talks

Citations, criticism and jokes

@vvern Dec 2020 Cites it
on HN thread Kafka Is Not a Database
Read more
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]
Cited for the 'invert the database' idea

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