Rowing is sometimes defined as the art of going nowhere backwards as fast as you can in a boat. As a master (meaning “old”) rower, I spend a lot of time going nowhere backwards in a boat. The “fast” part is relative, but I do compete with my team in events as far away as Oak Ridge and Los Angeles and sometimes we win. My Akiban colleagues can confirm that one thing a rower likes to do more than rowing is talking about it.
Recently they heard a lot about an annual event in Boston called the Head of the Charles Regatta. It draws nearly ten thousand competitors from all over the world, this year including my wife, my stepdaughters and me.
Catastrophic possibilities include collisions with other boats, collisions with bridges, and in our case, collisions with teenage moods. It was a risky experiment. The issue wasn't winning. It was arriving at the finish line with all four family members still willing to talk with each other. Of course my secret stretch goal was to beat at least one of the other seventeen boats in our event to avoid being dead last.
Stretch goal achieved! At-least until we saw the official results and discovered that due to their age the crew behind us had a 85 second handicap advantage and had officially beaten us by fourteen seconds. Bummer. But we are still talking to each other and are ready to compete as a family quadruple scull again at the next opportunity.
I recently realized that I have been rowing for over forty years. That means I started at about the same time B-Trees were invented. And through some twists and turns my professional life has revolved around B-Trees for much of that time. My current role at Akiban is to develop the B-Tree storage module on which the Akiban server is built.
Despite the B-Tree's venerable history there is still vigorous research and development being done in both the academic and the commercial worlds. We think we've invented a couple of interesting ideas ourselves. In coming posts I will describe the architecture of the Akiban B-Tree implementation and share some of the new ideas and directions we are pursuing.