This is just a "note to self" or cheatsheet...

I'm working on the new distributed consensus algorithm about to appear in Cassandra 5.0. I see that I frequently lose momentum when I have to resort to the formal definition of the algorithm. Because I was never good at reading mathematical notation with a lot of greek letters...

So, let's translate the greek letters to English words:

It's time to pick up our series on consistency and replication again. See consistency tag for the previous paper reviews on the topic.

I had thought I could live a happy life as a database engineer, and eventually retire, without ever having to actually read any literature on Paxos.

How did it start?

Parkinson's disease develops slowly, we don't know what causes it, and it can't be stopped. But for most patients, the key word is slowly.

Apparently a common early symptom is a weakened sense of smells. I had that since my teenage years. I just thought it was because I was allergic a lot.

There's a Swedish jazz sång, originally performed by Monica Zetterlund, that I find beautiful.

Sakta vi gå genom stan. (Beppe Wolgers, Roy Turk and Fred E. Ahlert, 1961)

The song is about a couple walking home, through the streets of Stockholm, in a bright summer night.

As I started at Datastax in June of the past year, I also swinged back from being an IC engineer to being an engineering manager. This is a common topic to blog about, see for example Adam Comerford and Charity Majors.

While most focus in Cassandra world is on the upcoming 4.0 release, or perhaps on our project to add JSON and GraphQL APIs to Cassandra, a feature that excites me personally is much more fundamental and at the core of th