From Interns, With Love: CockroachDB Internship Projects

CockroachDB has hosted several interns over the years who have worked on various projects. Two notable projects from their most recent batch include read-based compaction heuristics and query denylists. The first project, led by Aaditya Sondhi, focused on introducing read-based compactions to Pebble, a storage engine based on log-structured merge trees (LSMs). This was done to lower read amplification for subsequent reads, thus lowering resource utilization and improving read performance. The second project, led by Angela Wen, involved the introduction of a mechanism to gate certain classes of queries from being run against the database. This was motivated by the need to deny queries-of-death during emergent situations. Other interns worked on projects such as query runtime statistics, design tokens, quorum recovery, metamorphic schema changes, and import compatibility.