Life Beyond Distributed Transactions / Space-efficient Static Trees and Graphs [PWL NYC]

Jonathan Brown presents Life Beyond Distributed Transactions by Pat Helland.

This paper explores and names some of the practical approaches used in the implementations of large-scale mission-critical applications in a world which rejects distributed transactions.

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Vaibhav Sagar presents Space-efficient Static Trees and Graphs by Guy Jacobsen.

In this era of bountiful disk space and unlimited cloud storage, it seems
ridiculous to claim that data takes up too much of it. But it does!

In this 1989 paper, Guy Jacobson (whose PhD thesis is credited with creating this field of research) introduces a set of techniques to create what he calls "succinct data structures", which approach the information-theoretical lower bound for space usage while still allowing useful operations to be performed on the resulting representation. They accomplish this by getting rid of pointers for linking data and operating directly at the bit level. These techniques are used to encode trees and planar graphs, and although the details have changed in the last 30 years, the fundamental concepts are very much the same and still the focus of active research.

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