Iggy Fernandez

Bertrand’s Chord Paradox Isn’t About Chords—It’s About Symmetry, and What We Mean by “Random.” linkedin.com/pulse/bertrand…

Yet Another Paradox Paper osf.io/preprints/osf/… via @OSFramework @3blue1brown

Happy to be back on Twitter. It will always be Twitter to me, not Xitter. My account was hacked and an authenticator app enabled. I could not login even though I could reset my password. Multiple support tickets later, I'm back. What's happening?

Snake Oil Matter? Thus spoke ChatGPT. linkedin.com/pulse/snake-oi…

Thoughts on October 7 and analysis of the Social Media message titled “Excerpts from Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech Israel’s Call”: linkedin.com/pulse/thoughts…

SQL, or GoogleSQL, that is the question linkedin.com/pulse/sql-goog…

Decoding AI Hallucinations: Mechanisms, Misconceptions, and the Mastery of Generative Intelligence linkedin.com/pulse/decoding…

Death by Giant Turnip linkedin.com/pulse/death-gi…

My Days Among The Dead Are O’er—An Ode To ChatGPT (with lots of help from ChatGPT) linkedin.com/pulse/my-days-…

Check out my latest article: The Battle of the AIs: The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything! linkedin.com/pulse/battle-a… via @LinkedIn

A special song for the lunch sponsor @Quest at the quarterly conference of the Northern California Oracle Users Group at the Oracle conference center in Redwood City. A BIG THANK YOU to @Quest for being such a loyal supporter of user groups.

A BIG THANK YOU to lunch sponsor @Quest at the quarterly conference of the Northern California Oracle Users Group at the Oracle conference center in Redwood City. Thank you @Quest for being such a loyal supporter of user groups.

A special song for the lunch sponsor @Quest at the quarterly conference of the Northern California Oracle Users Group at the Oracle conference center in Redwood City. A BIG THANK YOU to @Quest for being such a loyal supporter of user groups.

“I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” These profound words remind us that while the external world may impose itself upon us with unforeseen challenges, we retain an unyielding sovereignty over our internal worlds. instagram.com/reel/Cv3SMlpqB…

@gwenshap It is possible to construct transaction histories that are arguably acceptable even if they cannot be produced by any serial execution of the transactions involved. However, serializability of transaction histories is commonly used as the definition of correctness.

The intersection between transactions and ACID is especially interesting. You can have ACID without transactions (BerkleyDB had ACID guarantees on single statements). But once you had transactions, they interact with all letters. Atomic: fully committed or fully rolled back Consistent: RDBMS define consistency as "enforce FK constraints". PG and Oracle support checking FK constraints for consistency either for every operation in a transaction or once at the end of a transaction (deferred). Isolated: The famous 4 isolation levels. Ideally, concurrent transactions will result in a state that is achievable with some serial execution. In practice, it is rare for real systems to run this way, so some anomalies are allowed. Durable: Once committed, transactions should survive crashes and other errors.

I've ran into quite a few social posts that conflate relational databases, SQL, transactions and ACID. This is wrong in the sense that these are different concepts and you can mix and match them in different ways. But turns out that historically, RDBMS predates SQL and ACID by a few years. RDBMS were first defined in 1970. In Codd's famous paper: "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Banks." SQL language was first published in 1974: "SEQUEL: A Structured English Query Language" ACID was first coined in 1983, although Jim Grey claimed IBM databases had ACID since 1973. And the SQL standard only formally defined transaction isolation levels in 1992 (!)

@gwenshap Hal Berenson was VP of RDS at Amazon and was one of my interviewers when I applied there. I did not know the name of the person who had been interviewing me but somehow this paper came up in the conversation and that's when he told me his name.

@gwenshap The big problem is that applications do not use SERIALIZABLE isolation even when it is available. It would seem that they value concurrency over integrity. Or that the developers were just not aware of the problem.

@gwenshap The "snapshot isolation" level level was only required because of the "common misconception that disallowing the three phenomena implies serializability" (quoting from the paper).

@gwenshap NLP. Generate AI will translate natural language queries (any language, not only English) and retrieve data using plug-ins. The masses will get the data they crave without having to learn "high-level, non-procedural languages." An old quote from an old paper:

What do *you* see as the biggest trends in cloud-native databases these days? (feel free to define "DB" any way you want - any data model, any type of consistency, etc) I'll share my view next week, but want to hear yours first... just in case I missed something big :)