Foundations

The fewest mechanisms that explain most of what goes wrong in a data system.

1. 1Physical Substrate & Performance LawsWhy do trade-offs exist at all?
2. 2Storage: Physical OrganizationWhat should sit next to what, given that I must decide at write time and find out at read time?
3. 3Encoding, Serialization & CompressionWhat do we turn our values into when we turn them into bytes, and what does that choice cost?
4. 4Query ProcessingWhy can one question be answered by plans whose costs differ by a factor of ten thousand, and what does each operator force the engine to do?
5. 5Execution Engine RuntimeOnce a query plan is chosen, why does the machine still sit idle, and what does each mechanism of a query runtime pay to buy that idle time back?
6. 6Fault Tolerance & Delivery SemanticsWhat is the cheapest thing that can be safely done twice?
7. 7Time & Temporal SemanticsWhen am I allowed to act on data that may still be incomplete, and what do I owe the reader if I was wrong?
8. 8Data ModelingWhat does one row mean, who is allowed to change that answer, and what breaks downstream when they do?

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