Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

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St. Louis, MO

A Type Driven Approach to Functional Design

There are many reasons to use an eventually-consistent database -- like Riak, Voldemort, or Cassandra -- including increased availability, lower latency, and fault-tolerance. However, doing so requires a mental shift in how to structure client applications, and certain types of traditional data-structures, like sets, registers, and counters can't be resolved simply in the face of race-conditions. It is difficult to achieve "logical monotonicity" except for the most trivial data-types.

That is, until the advent of Convergent Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). CRDTs are data-structures that tolerate eventual consistency. They replace traditional data-structure implementations and all have the property that, given any number of conflicting versions of the same datum, there is a single state on which they converge (monotonicity). This talk will discuss some of the most useful CRDTs and how to apply them to solve real-world data problems.

Michael Feathers

Michael Feathers

Groupon

Michael Feathers is a Member of the Technical Staff at Groupon. Prior to joining Groupon, Michael was the Chief Scientist of Obtiva, and a Senior Consultant with Object Mentor International. Over the years, Michael has spent a great deal of time helping teams after design over time in code bases. Michael is also the author of the book Working Effectively with Legacy Code (Prentice Hall, 2004).