@PatHelland profile picture
Pat Helland @PatHelland

Building distributed systems & databases since 1978. Now at Salesforce. Dropped out of UC Irvine in 1976. Write for ACM Queue & blog @ pathelland.substack.com

Joined December 2011
  • Tweets 775
  • Following 1,153
  • Followers 4,604
17 Photos and videos
If you love databases, at least look at the program for CIDR 2024 and consider attending. There are still "rooms at the inn". cidrdb.org/cidr2024/program.… I will be there to present my paper: pathelland.substack.com/p/bd… and hope you can come to engage in fun discussions with me!
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Today is my younger brother's birthday. He's 1,000,000 years old. So proud of him! Base 2 is awesome.
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Available now: pathelland.substack.com/p/ac…. Here's my recent article for "Escaping the Singularity: It's Not Your Grandmother's Database Anymore" (my ACM Queue column). The article is called: "I'm Probably Less Deterministic Than I Used to Be".

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A new blog post linking to a video of my recent ACM DEBS keynote: "I'm SO Glad I'm Uncoordinated!" pathelland.substack.com/p/vi… The video explores the increasing challenges we face with coordination in systems and describes a taxonomy of "tricks" commonly used to reduce the pain.

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It was fun meeting with James Agnew and Adam Cole to discuss a topic that's new to me: Challenges in standardizing information exchange in healthcare. An interesting and challenging space! Thanks to both Mark Compton and @ACMQueue for all the hard work to pull this together.
ACM Queue@ACMQueue
18 May 2022
Case Study FHIR: Reducing Friction in the Exchange of #Healthcare #Data James Agnew, @PatHelland, and Adam Cole discuss the efforts and misadventures witnessed as we approach the reality of healthcare providers exchanging patient records. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=…
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I just posted pathelland.substack.com/p/im… to my blog. It explores my existential transformation caused by a mid-life crisis about determinism and probabilities. This dramatically impacts how I perceive complex systems. It also helps me understand computer scientists and engineers.

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My new paper on Autonomous Computing is now out on queue.acm.org for access to ACM members. It is also available in my blog at: pathelland.substack.com/p/ac…

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I just created a new section in my blog for papers and presentations on Autonomous Computing. See pathelland.substack.com/p/au… This section will contain supporting material for my upcoming ACM Queue article on that topic.

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The video for my "Decoupled Transactions" paper for CIDR 2022 is now online. Just some thoughts about bounding latency. Video: youtube.com/watch?v=72UZ8DxP… Paper:cidrdb.org/cidr2022/papers/p… Thanks to the folks running CIDRDB.org for a great conference! Amazing job!

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My "Decoupled Transactions" paper for CIDR 2022 is now online: cidrdb.org/cidr2022/papers/p… It's a thought experiment about a low tail latency snapshot isolation database running atop servers that may go slow. Explores using quorum and confluence to manage distributed resources.
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My wife and I moved back to the Puget Sound. Finally got my Washington State license plate for my Honda! It's nice to be back home. Moving is hard work, though!
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Version 3 of pathelland.substack.com/p/do… looks at consistency in the CAP Theorem. CAP theorem: CONSISTENT READS are only possible if you're willing to sacrifice availability or partition-tolerance. Consistent reads, Availability, Partition-tolerance: Pick Two. CAP is really CrAP!
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I just posted a new and shorter version of my Autonomous Computing paper on my blog pathelland.substack.com. pathelland.substack.com/p/au….
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Tyler's observation is spot on... Lots of things change in the future if you pay attention to the inversion of our challenges. Fun times!
Tyler Jewell@TylerJewell
27 Feb 2021
Replying to @PatHelland
Opportunities for innovation in log mgmt, observability, edge scale systems, distributed databases, and cache systems for those who are paying attention.
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Pat Helland retweeted
Pat Helland@PatHelland
27 Feb 2021
Replying to @TylerJewell
An enthusiastic YES to all the things you enumerated. New and important solutions will emerge if we apply creativity to new innovations that squander CPU, storage, memory, and bandwidth to reduce latency. It's a heckuva wonderful time to be a nerd!
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My most recent blog post is now online. pathelland.substack.com/p/i-… This discusses the huge costs of coordination in our systems and some tricks we use to avoid the pain.

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Today's my birthday. I've published a completely irrelevant blog post for absolutely no reason other than I think it's fun. pathelland.substack.com/p/us… Don't assume that my new age means I have a retiring personality.

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I really enjoyed yesterday's tweet-fest about consistency. I got up at 6am and started reading more and writing. Here's a new version of yesterday's post. pathelland.substack.com/p/do… This one's about 60 % longer with new stuff on linearizability and also about the CAP theorem.

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Check out my new blog post at pathelland.substack.com/p/do…. More coming soon (I hope).

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Baleen!!!! x.com/RexChapman/status/1349… queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=…

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