-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
Redis
Redis is an in-memory database that persists on disk. The data model is key-value, but many different kind of values are supported: Strings, Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, Hashes, Streams, HyperLogLogs, Bitmaps.
About 4 months ago (approximately the last time I wrote something here), I opted to embark on a graduate school journey at Stony Brook University, Computer Science (if you have a remote position — Technical Writer and/or Software Engineer position — at a non-USA company, don't hesitate to reach out). Was it the best decision to make considering less pay (if any), more theoretical undertakings and assumptions, and a very new culture and environment? I can't tell sincerely. I, however, genuinely want to garner enough knowledge to do real research and this is the best time for me to do so. That's enough motivation. I have also met cool and loving individuals. Besides, I had a thorough challenge posed by one of the courses I took in the 2023 fall semester: Distributed Systems. It had some labs — 4 normal labs with a bonus, the skeletal files for each lab can be seen here. The labs culminated in building a sharded and replicated fault-tolerant key-value store with transaction support based on the Raft Consensus Algorithm using Optimistic Concurrency Control(OCC) and subsequently, two-phase locking (2PL). All the implementation was in the difficult low-level programming language, C++. Though some untoward stuff happened at the tail end (I may get to write about it later), my goal was eventually achieved. I learned quite a bit:
A very interesting thing is my Professor, Yanhong Annie Liu, created a language for distributed algorithms, DistAlgo. The implementation of Raft and other distributed algorithms in the language is pretty solid. I shall be writing about the language as soon as I get comfortable with it. Kindly be on the lookout.
The raft implementation above is pretty low-level and by itself, isn't particularly useful. It needs to be used by a bigger system which directly benefits the users. An example of such a system is a key-value store like Redis. This lab expects you to utilize the raft previously implemented to build a fault-tolerant key-value database. Your implementation should support Put(key, value), Append(key, value), and Get(key). Of course, you can support Delete(key) too to have a full CRUD functionality. It's relatively simpler compared to the previous lab though it has its nuances: