This list is a compilation of readings which are valuable to a general understanding of the operation of Cockroach. This list is extensive (but not exhaustive), don't feel you need to read everything here, it's provided as a way to drill down into topics you find interesting, if you so choose. The entries in each section are roughly organized in recommended order of consumption, but this is not a strict ordering in any sense.

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• Value-cognizant Admission Control for RTDB Systems

• Enlightening the I/O Path: A Holistic Approach for Application Performance

• Real-Time Database and Information Systems

• Admission control and scheduling of remote processes in loosely-coupled distributed systems

• Regulating I/O Performance of Shared Storage with a Control Theoretic Approach

• The creation of the io.latency block I/O controller

• Constructing and Analyzing the LSM Compaction Design Space

• Online Bigtable merge compaction

• IOCost: Block IO Control for Containers in Datacenters

• Overload Control for Scaling WeChat Microservices

• Controlling Queue Delay

• Fail at Scale

Transactions

• A History of Transaction Histories: https://ristret.com/s/f643zk/history_transaction_histories

• ANSI Critique: https://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0701157.pdf

• Yabandeh: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9GCVTp_FHJIMjJ2U2t6aGpHLTFUVHFnMTRUbnBwc2pLa1RN/edit

  • An extremely well-written explanation of optimistic serializable transactions. I think this is one of the best resources for gaining intuition about transactions.

• How CockroachDB Does Distributed, Atomic Transactions: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-cockroachdb-distributes-atomic-transactions/

• Serializable, Lockless, Distributed: Isolation in CockroachDB: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/serializable-lockless-distributed-isolation-cockroachdb/

• Understanding Weak Isolation: http://www.bailis.org/blog/understanding-weak-isolation-is-a-serious-problem/

• Read-Only Transaction Anomaly: https://www.cs.umb.edu/~poneil/ROAnom.pdf

  • Explanation of a surprising and unintuitive anomaly that can occur in Snapshot Isolation

• What Does Write Skew Look Like: http://justinjaffray.com/what-does-write-skew-look-like/

  • A (hopefully) simplified explanation of Fekete 2005.

• Fekete 2005: https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/infolab/Data/Courses/CS632/2009/Papers/p492-fekete.pdf

• Empirical Evaluation: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/papers/p781-wu.pdf

  • Mostly relevant to in-memory databases (which CockroachDB is not), but a good overview of the main components of an MVCC system.

• Adya Thesis: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.32.1760&rep=rep1&type=pdf

  • Very dense, formal treatment of isolation levels. Not really recommended unless you're trying to win an argument.

• Hermitage: https://github.com/ept/hermitage

  • Martin Kleppmann's testing of different databases' isolation levels (mapping SQL standard levels like REPEATABLE READ to the richer categorization of Adya)

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• Basics of SQL indexing, independent of database: https://use-the-index-luke.com/

• Index Selection in CockroachDB: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/index-selection-cockroachdb-2/

  • Not especially specific to Cockroach - great as an introduction to index selection

• SQL Query Planning: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/docs/RFCS/20171213_sql_query_planning.md

• Andy K on Optimizer: The Story So Far (April 2018): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAfAVv9SFIc

• Andy Pavlo optimizer lectures

  • Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbfPpWnAP-4

  • Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7GxSvdV4NU

• The Cascades Framework for Query Optimization

  • This is what our optimizer is based on.

• Fundamental Techniques for Order Optimization by Simmen et. al

  • Explains how to manipulate orders, not aware of a publicly available PDF

• pkg/sql/opt/doc.go: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/pkg/sql/opt/doc.go

• Optimization of Analytic Window Functions: http://vldb.org/pvldb/vol5/p1244_yucao_vldb2012.pdf

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