Intro: Chaos Engineering BoF

In 2007, Pat Helland published "Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostates Opinion," in which he conducts a thought experiment on how to design a distributed database that can scale almost infinitely. While the paper explicitly addresses distributed database design, Sean Allen shows that the ideas are far more widely applicable, particularly in scaling stateful applications.

Focusing on a mix of artificial, scientific, and environmental sensing data, Aurelia Moser explores fantasy and farcical mapping, teasing out the tough parts of geocoding on real and mythical spatial matrices while delving into the contrived topographies of null island, paper towns, "dumb" cities, and the infinitely curious world of geospeculative design in JavaScript.

Last November, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published the Paradise Papers, a yearlong investigation on the offshore dealings of multinational companies and the wealthy. Pierre Romera offers a behind-the-scenes look into the process and explores the challenges in handling 1.4 TB of data and making it available securely to journalists all over the world.

Divya Ramachandran explains how top insurance companies have used handwriting transcription powered by deep learning to achieve a more than 70% reduction in daily operational processing time, develop a best-in-industry predictive model for assessing mortality risk from decades of archived forms, and enable a smarter claims leakage review, which led to a 10x ROI in its first year.

Security is a challenge for most companies. Especially those in periods of rapid growth. It is often taken for granted as we trust the frameworks we use to implement the necessary security protocols f …

Query processing technology has rapidly evolved since the iconic C-Store paper was published in 2005, with a focus on designing query processing algorithms and data structures that efficiently utilize CPU and leverage the changing trends in hardware to deliver optimal performance. Siddharth Teotia outlines the different types of vectorized query processing in Dremio using Apache Arrow.