Tag
Storage
3 posts tagged Storage.
Bigtable: What the Distributed Storage Paper Actually Says
Bigtable's data model is three lines: a sorted map indexed by (row, column, timestamp). Everything that makes it powerful — and everything that makes it dangerous — follows from those three lines.
GFS: What the Google File System Paper Actually Says
GFS isn't just 'distributed POSIX.' The paper is an exercise in deliberately violating POSIX to make large-scale sequential workloads tractable on unreliable hardware. The consistency model it chose — intentionally weaker than what you'd expect — defines everything downstream, including HDFS.
Cassandra: What the Paper Actually Says
We had a Cassandra cluster where DELETE operations made reads progressively slower until queries timed out. Adding more disk space made it worse. The root cause is described precisely in the 2009 paper — but only if you understand that Cassandra cannot actually delete data.