Database Seminar - Marco Primi
September 28, 2026 4:30PM—5:30PM
Location:
Virtual Presentation - ET
-
Remote Access - Zoom
Speaker:
MARCO PRIMI
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcoprimi/
Programs used to run on a single computer start to end. Today nearly all software is part of a larger distributed system. Databases were among the earliest to undergo this transition at the turn of the century, replication, fault-tolerance, consensus, scalability were the hot topics of the early cloud era, and they are still relevant today more than ever.
The shift to distributed-everything has been bumpy, to say the least. Testing techniques developed during the program's age have proven themselves ineffective on systems that need to deal with interleavings, message delays, partial failures, and mind-numbing vast state spaces.
Over the past decade, new testing techniques have emerged to confront these new challenges. We will review some of these techniques such as property-based testing, deterministic simulation testing, chaos testing, guided fuzzing, mutation testing, differential testing, and more.
I’ll introduce Antithesis, a platform designed to put these powerful techniques at your fingertips, allowing you to catch even the most insidious and rare bugs in minutes. As an example, we’ll review bugs Antithesis found in Raft implementation, which represents the heart of numerous databases and storage systems upon which our world relies.
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Marco Primi identifies as a database and a systems dependability nerd. After graduating with a Master in Dependable Distributed Systems, Marco spent the last 15 years working on large and complex systems in places like Apple and Netflix. Marco's primary area of interest is leveraging distributed system theory and formal methods to build high-performance, scalable, reliable distributed systems. With special focus on replication and consensus.
This talk is part of the Whatever Andy Found Interesting While Out At Sea.
Zoom Participation. See announcement.
For More Information:
db-www@cs.cmu.edu