Exciting news this month! Members and friends of Foulab are planning some November events - and the more days pass, the closer we get.

Saturday November 18th @ 19:00 - 21:00

A Trivia night? True Foulabers remember - our very own kida used to host a recurring get-together of trivia-inclined minds to keep us together during COVID.

It returns the third Saturday of November, in person at Foulab. Come join us for a treat of an evening!

Sunday November 19th @ 10:30 - 17:00

Another partnership with a friendly organization, an open Sunday full of Debian & Stuff is happening on the 19th. An all-day gathering of Linux enthusiasts and whatever friends would like to come by? Definitely worth it to check it out, if you have a Sunday free.

Saturday November 25th @ 15:00 - 17:00

We are going have an organizational meeting. It’s a great way to get yourself involved in the local community - and get a peek at the near future of Foulab while you’re at it! Swing by, if you’re interested.

Sunday November 26th @ 15:00 - 19:00

Killed by Dice, a tabletop roleplaying community hosted by Foulab’s der_moderne_man, humbly invites you to join a public session of Mothership - a nail-biting sci-fi RPG centered around a horror from outer space. …Gulp. The situation needs urgent player help - please RSVP here, slots are limited!

Foulab is now officially registered as a project on the Libera.Chat IRC network. This means the channel has moved from ##foulab to #foulab (single hash mark). A redirect has been setup, so your client might already be on the new channel.

This also comes with improvements to foubot like the ability to change the topic with the status of the lab.

Tuesday October 31st 2023 @ 18:30-23:00

A Halloween party? Don’t mind if we do. Come one come all for an unforgettable evening of scary high-tech stuff and exciting company of friendly neighbourhood cyberpunks.

Come dressed as hackers - or as whoever you want :)

Hey all.

We’re officially back with our first event in a while, a fresh new collaboration with PapersWeLove.

In this event, Catalin Patulea will be presenting the famous 2006 paper BigTable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data by F. Chang et al.

A brief abstract from the announcement on Meetup:

Bigtable was developed by Google from 2004 to 2006 for storing large amounts of semi-structured data in a wide range of applications, including web indexing, Google Earth, Google Finance, Google Analytics and others. Its design lies somewhere between traditional relational databases (RDBMS) and pure key-value stores, which later inspired a family of storage systems such as Apache Cassandra and Amazon DynamoDB. Modern storage systems such as Google Spanner and CockroachDB also contain design elements similar to Bigtable. Therefore Bigtable is of both historical and current interest.

In this talk, we will start with the basic data structures used by Bigtable: SSTables and log-structured merge (LSM) trees. We will show a highly simplified LSM-tree implemented in Python and demonstrate its functions. This is the basic unit of scaling in Bigtable.

Then, we will roughly follow the 2006 paper: 1) data model and client API, 2) the underlying infrastructure on which Bigtable is built, 3) how the database distributes work across many machines and achieves scaling.

We will briefly cover more advanced topics such as tuning Bigtable for specific use cases or to improve resource efficiency.

Light refreshments will be served.