bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Effectiveness Test of Methanol, Ethyl Acetate, and Chloroform Fractions of Bidara Leaf Extract (Zizyphus mauritiana L.) on Wound Healing in Rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus)
Authors: Umarella Novel , Wirasti Wirasti , Slamet Slamet , Waznah Urmatul
Published: November 2024

Bidara (Zizyphus mauritiana L.) contains alkaloids, glycosides, saponins, flavonoids, terpenoids, phenols, and the best antioxidant properties of its leaves. In bidara leaf, they are antibacterial, antiviral, and antiseptic, play a role in cell regeneration and repair, so they are effective in wound healing. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of bidara leaf extract fractions on incision wounds and determine which fraction was more effective in narrowing the incision wound. Making wounds on rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) using the Morton method, by making an incision on the back with a diameter of 2 cm. Testing the effectiveness of fractions in wound healing with rabbits divided into 5 groups, namely positive control, negative control, methanol fraction (MeOH), ethyl acetate fraction (Ethac), and chloroform fraction (CHCl3) with a dose of 100 mg/KgBB rabbit in 1 ml of solvent. The diameter of the wound area was measured using the Macbiophotonic Image J program, and the data were analyzed using One Way Anova (ANOVA) followed by the Tukey test. The results of data analysis using the ANOVA method with a significant value of 0,004 (p<0,05). The conclusion of the results of the research conducted for 8 days shows that the MeOH, Ethac, and CHCl3 fractions of bidara leaf extract have the effectiveness of wound healing in rabbits with differences in healing shown by the Ethac fraction with a better effect than the MeOH and CHCl3 fractions.
Pengamanan Pesan Teks Menggunakan Affine Cipher dan Algoritma Goldbach Code
Authors: Rafika Zahrotul Fauziah  , Khudzaifah Muhammad , Herawati Erna
Published: November 2024

Perkembangan informasi saat ini memiliki dampak negatif juga positif. Untuk menanggulangi adanya dampak negatif, diperlukan adanya kriptografi. Hal ini bertujuan agar keamanan pesan teks terjaga. Affine Cipher merupakan salah satu algoritma kriptografi simetris yang menggunakan (m) sebagai kunci multiplikatif dan (b) sebagai jumlah pergeseran pada saat proses enkripsi. Pada saat proses dekripsi menggunakan balikan dari kunci multiplikatif (m-1). Goldbach Code diasumsikan bahwa setiap bilangan bulat genap yang lebih besar dari empat merupakan penjumlahan dari dua bilangan prima. Penelitian ini memiliki dua tahapan, yaitu: proses enkripsi dan dekripsi. Pada penelitian ini, proses yang akan dilakukan bertujuan untuk mengamankan pesan teks yang diawali dengan mengenkripsikannya menggunakan Affine Cipher dan setelahnya akan dikompresi dengan menggunakan Algoritma Goldbach Code untuk menghasilkan cipherteks. Kemudian untuk mengembalikan pesan akan didekompresi dengan menggunakan Algoritma Goldbach Code dan dekripsi dengan menggunakan Affine Cipher. Dengan menggabungkan Affine Cipher dan Algoritma Goldbach code hasil dari proses pengamanan pesan teks akan lebih aman dikarenakan cipherteks yang dihasilkan memiliki panjang bit yang berbeda.
Kata kunci: Affine Cipher; Goldbach Code; Algoritma Kompresi; Kriptografi
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The development of information today has both negative and positive impacts. To overcome the negative impact, cryptography is needed. This aims to maintain the security of text messages. Affine Cipher is a symmetric cryptography algorithm that uses (m) as the multiplicative key and (b) as the number of shifts during the encryption process. The decryption process uses the reciprocal of the multiplicative key (m-1). Goldbach Code assumes that every even integer greater than four is the sum of two prime numbers. This research has two stages, namely: encryption and decryption process. In this research, the process that will be carried out aims to secure text messages that begin by encrypting them using Affine Cipher and afterwards will be compressed using the Goldbach Code Algorithm to produce ciphertext. Then to restore the message, it will be decompressed using the Goldbach Code Algorithm and decrypted using Affine Cipher. By combining Affine Cipher and Goldbach Code Algorithm, the result of the text message security process will be more secure because the resulting ciphertext has a different bit length.
Keywords: Affine Cipher; Goldbach Code; Compression Algorithm; Cryptography
Empirical Evidence on the Link Between Compliance with Governance of Best Practice and Firms' Operating Results
Authors: Lama Tek
Published: November 2024

This study provides robust evidence in support of the agency theory argument that corporate governance matters for a firm’s operating performance. Using the corporate governance ratings as the governance proxy from Horwath 2006 Corporate Governance Report (mid-sized Australian ASX companies) and Mid-Cap Corporate Governance Report 2007 (The University of Newcastle 2006; 2007), I examine 60 sample firms to reveal that a firm’s governance is positively and significantly related to firm performance as measured by return on equity, earning yield and return on assets. This study extends the findings of these two reports which found a disturbing trend in the corporate governance practice of Australian mid-cap companies – both a decrease in companies with excellent corporate governance, and an increase in companies with significant corporate governance deficiencies. The findings of this study suggest that those mid-size companies who have allowed corporate governance to deteriorate have adversely affected their shareholder returns.
‘Bright Lights and Dark Knights’: Racial Publics and the Juridical Mourning of Gun Violence in Toronto
Authors: Buffam H.V. B.
Published: November 2024

On 26 December 2005, 15-year-old Jane Creba was killed by gunfire that erupted between two groups of young men in the central consumer district of Toronto. This article examines how the public mourning of this white high school student is routed through racial knowledges of criminality that invest her death with an affective ‘public’ significance in contradistinction to the other victims of gun violence in 2005, most of who were young African Canadian men reputed to participate in gangs. By explicating the racial modes of publicity that are borne of this event, this article illustrates how the mediated circulation of this crime scene works to articulate phantasmic geographies of segregation atop the more convivial forms of sociality that characterize life in the city. It then shows how ‘black’ gun violence is configured as a force exogenous to consumer spaces, warranting the use of legal technologies of the state to (re)establish the racial boundaries of the city. The article concludes by gesturing to the possibility of innovating modes of publicity that can resist and subvert the logic and affective force of racial knowledges that otherwise structure the mediation of crime.
The Scene of the Crime: The Uneasy Figuring of Anglo-Australian Sovereignty in the Landscape of Lantana
Authors: Duncanson K.
Published: November 2024

Throughout European occupation of the Australian landmass there has been a regular figuring across literature, cinema and news media of the landscape as the scene of crime. Women and children disappear into bush, deserts and mysterious rock formations, and men die, ostensibly killed by nothing but the unremitting landscape. These representations parallel the doctrine of terra nullius found in the practices of Anglo-Australian law. The doctrine assumes that the land is empty; belonging to no one. However, in the imaginations of law and popular culture the emptiness is never quite complete. Rather, there is always something not quite there in the land, appearing to different degrees of presence, taking on shifting fantastic forms. It is an ominous nothing that does violence, threatening the colonisers and the sovereignty of their law. But Lantana offers a different version of this imaginative flight by relocating the scene of the crime from the ‘native’ bushland to an introduced weed. This relocation shifts the problem of troubled sovereignty back onto coloniser. In this cinematic depiction of the landscape as crime scene a recently emerging anxiety concerning the colonising violence of Anglo-Australian law is realised: the scene of the crime becomes the foundation of law itself.
Entering a dream: two days of a native title trial in the north-east Kimberley
Authors: Reilly A.
Published: November 2024

This article describes the taking of two days of traditional evidence in the Federal Court trial of Ben Ward and Ors on behalf of the Miriuwung and Gajerrong peoples vs. the State of WA and Ors. The applicants filed for the determination of native title in the National Native Title Tribunal in April 1994. After mediation in the Tribunal failed, the application was referred to the Federal Court in January 1995. Initial directions were given by Judge Lee in March 1995, and the taking of traditional evidence occurred between July and October, 1997. The trial at first instance is expected to run until early 1998. It is the first native title hearing to proceed in the Federal Court in Western Australia, and one of the first anywhere on the mainland.
Terra nullius
Authors: Mallard J.
Published: November 2024

Tonight the stars shine so bright against their backdrop of infinity. I arrived here in Sharks Bay this morning at 9.00 am after hiring a lift from the roadhouse with the town taxi driver who knew of Joe Mallard when he was young,...and had lots to say about Mabo and the World Heritage issue ...
- Journal excerpt Sat Aug 7 1993
‘Riddle me this…?’ Would the world need superheroes if the law could actually deliver ‘justice’?
Authors: Sharp Cassandra
Published: November 2024

As an entertainment and cultural icon, the costumed superhero pervades our culture, and superhero imagery (in both literary and visual forms) is ubiquitous (Morris and Morris 2005: ix).1 Superhero stories present and explore many important and pressing concerns such as ethics, justice, crime, punishment and social responsibility. Originating in the visually stimulating form of comic books, superheroes have transitioned well into other forms of popular culture – ranging from children’s animated television series (such as Superhero Squad or Spectacular Spiderman) through to the slick special-effects laden Hollywood productions (such as Iron Man 2008, Fantastic Four 2005, The Avengers 2012) and the ofttimes violent and explicit ‘mature audience’ cinematic portrayals (such as Watchmen 2009). In any format, superheroes are generally set apart not just for their special powers or impressive gadgets, but for their fearlessness in the face of betrayal, chaos and destructive violence. They ‘pursue justice, defending the defenceless, helping those who cannot help themselves and overcoming evil with the force of good’ (Loeb and Morris 2005: 11).
Searching the Academy (Soushuyuan搜書院): A Chinese Opera as Rule of Law and Legal Narrative
Authors: Ho Elaine Y.L. , Chan Johannes M.M.
Published: November 2024

In earlier scholarship on traditional societies that became colonised, relations between imported legal systems and indigenous customs that had long operated with quasi-legal effect are often studied in terms of conflict and opposition, to show how western or European institutions progressively displaced what existed before their arrival. In her more recent studies of legal pluralism, however, Lauren Benton argues persuasively from many historical examples and cases that indigenous culture and contingent historical situations are major forces that mediate legal development and change. Though acknowledging her debt to Homi Bhabha’s theorising of hybridised subjects and their disruptions of asymmetrical colonial relations, Benton nonetheless critiques Bhabha’s assumption of ‘a preexisting and relatively constant cultural divide’ (Benton and Muth 2000).
‘We Say Sorry’: Apology, the Law and Theatricality
Authors: Schmidt Theron
Published: November 2024

When ideas about theatre are used to describe political events, the theatrical is usually made to stand for that which is undesirable, inauthentic and empty about political life: we might describe a particular speech or gesture as ‘only theatre’, or use language such as ‘playing politics’ or ‘political drama’ to denounce the way self-referential questions about character or personal intrigue have obscured the ‘real’ issues of politics. In contrast to this dismissive usage, I would like to explore the ways that theatricality’s apparent failures or shortcomings might be themselves generative of political potential. My approach here is to consider certain problems of speech and gesture in the political realm as essentially theatrical problems — problems for theatre, but also ideas that theatricality makes problems of — such as problems of representation, authenticity and spectatorship. I will explore the theatricality at work in three examples of publicly performed discourse: Kevin Rudd’s official apology in 2008 to the Indigenous peoples of Australia; a gallery artwork by Carey Young which, in its entirety, is a legal disclaimer of its status as art; and a text and video work by Lebanese-born artist, Rabih Mroué, in which the artist offers an apology for the Lebanese civil war.
Of Pearls and Coral: Jurisography and Ego History
Authors: Docker John
Published: November 2024

In this talk I’d like to create a conversation between what Ann Genovese and Shaun McVeigh (2015) felicitously call ‘jurisography’, which is, we might say, just beginning its intellectual journey as a concept of great fertility and possibility, and what the French historiographer Pierre Nora (2001) refers to as ego-histoire, or ego history, which is now becoming an international intellectual movement. As will become clear, ego history is not simply to be identified with autobiography. I also do not equate ego history with jurisography. I wish to suggest there might be resonances between jurisography and ego history that we might think about.
Civilisation, Settlers and Wanderers: Law, Politics and Mobility in Nineteenth Century New Zealand and Australia
Authors: Seuffert Nan
Published: November 2024

Mobility was constitutive of the 19th century British colonial period in the Pacific. The circulation of capital and commodities, technologies of transportation and communication, travelling ideologies and systems of governance and surveillance, as well as the movement of explorers, whalers, labourers, settlers, missionaries, colonial administrators, convicts, soldiers, sojourners, immigrants, and transnational and displaced indigenous peoples, all shaped the politics and the period.
A change of heart: retraction and body
Authors: Jacob Marie-Andrée , Macdonald Anna
Published: November 2024

Our intervention stems from a shared interest in lines as material, somatic and metaphorical forms. The line that we interrogate is the strikethrough: the line superimposed upon text in order to retract a meaningful or weighty statement in particular legal proceedings. We ask what this seemingly simple device of erasure can reveal about the transparent retraction of a statement, and its place within a dispositif attributed to law. Taking note of the editors’ explicit injunction not to necessarily equate the material with the physical, we mine the artefactual qualities of the typographical line of strikethrough: to us it constitutes a digital device, physical mark and affective embodied force. A device, a mark, a force: these are precisely what make the strikethrough a material of sorts. We use materials to explore materials. We do this by bringing together socio-legal analysis and embodied practice-based research, using Macdonald’s moving image artwork Walk (strikethrough with pen) (2016) to refine how strikethrough registers as a distinctive legal material.
Postcolonial Feudal Hauntings of Northern Australian Cattle Stations
Authors: Anthony T.
Published: November 2024

Postcolonial feudal concepts applied to the northern cattle industry demonstrate how wide-scale Aboriginal labour exploitation entailed both colonists’ usurpation of land and an acquiescence of Aboriginal land interests. The critical role of Aboriginal labour to the fledgling cattle industry drew colonists and Indigenes into a relationship that accommodated competing land interests. Anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt reported in 1946: Especially on the larger [cattle station] holdings, something very much like a feudal situation developed: an overlord, with a circle of serfs over whom he had almost absolute power. The Aborigines, whether full-time employees or simply dependents ... were allowed to remain there on sufferance (Berndt 1987: 272).
'In the Name of God, Amen' Seeking the Testator's Authentic Voice in Research Using Wills
Authors: Vines P.
Published: November 2024

A Will is a written document which represents a unique form of communication between the dead and the living (Finch et al 1996). This statement hints at the complex nature of the interpretation of wills. Wills are documents which have a unique power. No other document can communicate beyond the grave in the voice of the deceased with that same combination of legal and personal power. In turn the communication from the living back to the deceased takes the form of acceptance of their wishes and the turning of those wishes into concrete form in many cases. It is not a simple transference of will (in the personal sense) from one to the other; rather, the executor must operate on the will by taking it to court or by other transactions and the beneficiary may interact with the will by choosing whether to comply with conditions and by using his or her own desires to deal with the corporeal remainder of the deceased, their estate.
Feminist Research in Crimino-Legal Studies: Reflections on 'Absolute Rubbish'
Authors: Carrington K.
Published: November 2024

This paper was initially written for an oral presentation at a seminar organised by the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of Wollongong. Translating it into a text form for a wider readership has not proved easy, given the lively, loud and gendered court-room dialogue upon which it draws is unable to be reproduced. The article commences with a brief sketch of some of the defining characteristics of research in feminist crimino-legal studies. This part of the paper assumes some familiarity with the epistemological debates that have hovered over social science research since the challenges of post-enlightenment philosophies to modernist knowledge claims. Then, reflecting on my own experiences as a witness subpoenaed before the Police Integrity Commission (PIC), the paper illustrates how the alignment between legal method with scientific positivism discredits feminist research in crimino-legal studies in much the same way as the legal process systematically disqualifies rape victims. I aim to demonstrate how this process of disqualification entails the asymmetrical arrangement of gendered bodies and spatiality in the hearing room, as well as the coercive exercise of a masculinist invalidation which operates through a micro-physics of power incompatible with the espoused judicial rhetoric of 'objectivity and neutrality'. The paper concludes with a salutary note about the future of feminist research in crimino-legal studies.
Hospitality, Subjectivity and Ceremony: Glee Confronts Hetero-normativity
Authors: Cranny-Francis Anne
Published: November 2024

As Matei Candea and Giovanni da Col note in their Preface to a special issue of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2012), the last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the notion of hospitality: From Levinas’s phenomenological ethics and Serres’s study of parasitic relationships, through to Agamben’s musings on ‘inclusive exclusion’ and Derrida’s invention of the neologism hostipitality’ (ii). They note also that political, literary and legal scholars have approached this topic through studies of the roles of host and guest, which has led to theorizations of related concerns including migration, postcoloniality, sovereignty and international law. This article also approaches the concept of hospitality by analyzing the roles of host and guest in a specific text, namely, an episode of the television series, Glee (2009–). My interest is how the characters in the episode articulate and embody these roles, and how their interactions are used to challenge conventional understandings of subjectivity and of hospitality. In particular, I consider their characterization by reference to Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of being as always fundamentally relational (being-with) and as always negotiated in relation to others (being singular plural). (Nancy 2000: 30)
Revisiting Hospitality: Opening doors beyond Derrida towards Nancy’s Inoperativity
Authors: Tataryn Anastasia
Published: November 2024

This article explores the phenomenon of migrant labour2 through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s hospitality. Developing the concept of hospitality as an analytical and ethical question, this article suggests some limits of hospitality when applied to issues of migrant labour and offers an account of inoperative hospitality, which draws on Jean- Luc Nancy’s discussions of inoperative community. Hospitality, as discussed by Jacques Derrida in Of Hospitality (2000), challenges us to think of our relation to each other—to the stranger, the foreigner, even to the one without a name—in reference to a limit or a border. The concept of hospitality, or hospitality as ethics,3 has been explored as a theoretical notion to challenge existing hostile and restrictive immigration policies and practices. In 1996, in a speech on the sanspapiers movement in France, Derrida deplored the idea that there can be crimes of hospitality in ‘Derelictions of the Right to Justice’ (Derrida 2002a: 133). He urged, ‘we must [il faut] be able to rediscover a taste for living in a culture, a language, and a country in which hospitality is no longer a criminal offense’ (Derrida 2002a: 140). Seyla Benhabib and Bonnie Honig also have questioned hospitality for its potential to be mandated, or reflected, in migration, rights and citizenship policies.
The Greatest Menace Review: Living with Shadows of the Past
Authors: McCrory Adrien
Published: November 2024

The Greatest Menace is an investigative podcast by Patrick Abboud and Simon Cunich which examines the history of Cooma Gaol, Australia’s experimental homosexual prison. The podcast explores a difficult and confronting piece of history, weaving together the past and the present as host Abboud attempts to uncover buried information about Cooma Gaol, the people incarcerated there and the people who operated it. This review explores the approaches taken by Abboud and Cunich to explore this history, mindful of the present-day impact that digging up these stories has on those involved. While investigating the prison’s past, Abboud interviews former prisoners, victims of police entrapment, family members of those who ran the prison, people in the town and the community and many others. The Greatest Menace reminds listeners that the process of interviewing and researching history are not neutral actions; they are actions that have the potential to open (and sometimes help heal) old wounds.
EDITORIAL: Transnational Audio Storytelling: Writing the Common Language of Sound
Authors: Romero Laura , McHugh Siobhan
Published: November 2024

Editorial on a special transnational issue of RadioDoc Review, curated by Dr Laura Romero and co-edited by A/Prof Siobhan McHugh. The issue features mainly sound-rich European works in languages other than English, critiqued by reviewers from four continents. It also showcases invited articles on mainstream podcasts, The Shadows (audio fiction) and Serial Season Three (crafted documentary) .
Serial, Season Three: From Feeling to Structure
Authors: Loviglio Jason
Published: November 2024

From the start, host and reporter Sarah Koenig presents the 2018 season of Serial as a corrective to the universe-in-a-grain-of-sand approach typical of earlier seasons and much of the work of This American Life, from which Serial spun off. In a thematic departure, Koenig sets out to tell the story of structures, rather than merely structure a story. The first character is a “cluster of concrete towers” in downtown Cleveland, called the Justice Center, a name we’ll quickly come to understand as ironic, if not Orwellian. Host Sarah Koenig describes the structure as “hideous but practical”. Koenig and company have built each episode to function like steps along a path, to provide a spatial sense of the Justice Center and a conceptual sense of the social universe in which its denizens reside.
In addition to meticulous structuring, Koenig needs all her charm, all her storytelling prowess, and all the wry humour she can wring from the cases she investigates, because the story of the Cleveland Justice Center is an American horror story. It is a damning indictment of the toxic stew of white supremacy, class divides, a punitive philosophy of corrections, and bureaucratic malfeasance that makes it nearly impossible for justice to be served. In a set of several stories about individual cases that occasionally overlap, spill over into different episodes, and circle back through coincidences and thematic unities only to fracture again, Koenig and her colleague Emmanuel Dzotsi evoke a world of cascading injustices.
Moving, Belonging, and Sorrow in ‘A Very Different Time’ by Phil Smith
Authors: Viñas Silvia
Published: November 2024

Phil Smith’s A Very Different Time weaves poetry, music, ambience and snapshots of stories in an audio piece about movement, nostalgia, change and sorrow. It includes the voices of people he met while living in Berlin: a West African refugee; a musician and academic from the United States; a Syrian refugee escaping war; an academic of Italian/German citizenship; and a German musician who moved from a small town to the city. To this stream of voices, Smith adds layers of music, different beats, street sounds, distortion, the ambience that recall the words – valleys, mountains, water and islands –and a central poem. His use of sound separates different sections in the story, creates rhythm, and builds a story arc. The piece sounds melancholic, an exploration of what is being lost when countries or people put up barriers to keep “the other” out.
Radio Drama Takeover 1: Hedda Gabler
Authors: Chignell Hugh
Published: November 2024

British radio drama since the creation of the BBC in 1922 has often been in the form of adapted stage plays. This has led to disagreements about whether the non-visual representation of dramas written for the theatre produces satisfactory results. This article explores this question using Ibsen’s realist drama, Hedda Gabler. It is argued that the audio version is successful and enables the listener to ‘overhear’ whispered conversations and share Hedda’s domestic claustrophobia.
INTRIGUE: MURDER IN THE LUCKY HOLIDAY HOTEL – a Greek tragedy in China
Authors: Song Sonya
Published: November 2024

Following the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, President Xi Jinping has rendered himself the omnipotent ruler of one fifth of the world’s population. Xi has defeated his political rivals with no mercy; among them was a rising political star, Bo Xilai, who was shot down in 2012 and is now in prison. Bo has been nearly forgotten – until early this year when his dramatic life and political battle were revived by Carrie Gracie with her brilliant BBC podcast series, Intrigue: Murder in the Lucky Holiday Hotel.
Although as a Chinese native I followed fairly closely the toppling of Bo, this series has provided me with many unheard materials. As a Google Policy Fellow studying news censorship, I happened to witness how Chinese media were controlled in the thick of Bo’s drama. For NetEase alone, a top news portal in China, about 50 articles were censored during the week when police chief Wang Lijun, once Bo’s right arm, ran to the US consulate for asylum. Gracie thrilllingly portrays a tragedy “with no heroes but only villains and victims”. They include: Bo, the fallen politician; Gu, his wife; Guagua, their son; Wang; and Neil Heywood, a British expat in China whose life was mythically entangled with elites across nations and whose death has forever changed Chinese history.
LavaStore: ByteDance's Purpose-Built, High-Performance, Cost-Effective Local Storage Engine for Cloud Services
Authors: Wang Hao , Ou Jiaxin , Zhao Ming , Qiu Sheng , Jiao Yizheng , Wang Yi , Mao Qizhong , Yang Zhengyu , Liu Yang , Zhang Jianshun , Hu Jianyang , Zhang Jingwei , Liu Jinrui , Chen Jiaqiang , Shen Yong , Cao Lixun , Zhang Heng , Li Hongde , Li Ming , Ma Yue , Zhang Lei , Liu Jian , Zhang Guanghui , Liu Fei , Chen Jianjun
Published: November 2024

Persistent key-value (KV) stores are widely used by cloud services at ByteDance as local storage engines, and RocksDB used to be the
de facto
implementation since it can be tailored to a variety of workloads and requirements. In this paper, we provide key insights into local storage engine usage at ByteDance, explain why the combination of highly write-intensive workloads and stringent requirements on cost efficiency and point lookup tail latency may pose challenges to a general-purpose local storage engine such as RocksDB, and present the design and implementation of
LavaStore
, a high-performance cost-effective local storage engine purpose-built to address these challenges.

LavaStore achieves its design goals by selectively customizing a few components of a RocksDB-based, general-purpose local storage engine, including a distinct KV separation design that decouples garbage collection from compaction, a specialized engine type for the commonly recurring Write-Ahead-Logging workload, and a customized user-space append-only filesystem. LavaStore has been deployed to production with hundreds of thousands of running instances, storing more than 100 PB of data and serving billions of requests per second, bringing significant performance improvements and cost reductions to customers over their original local storage engines. For example, a ByteDance proprietary distributed OLTP database service has experienced a reduction in average write and read latency by 61% and 16%, respectively, and a ByteDance proprietary caching service has gained an 87% increase in write throughput with no more than 6% space overhead.
Membrane - Safe and Performant Data Access Controls in Apache Spark in the Presence of Imperative Code
Authors: Paduroiu Andrei , Wi Sungheun , Yan Yan , Burd Roni , Farchtchi Ruhollah , Fumarola Giovanni Matteo
Published: November 2024

Data Governance is an increasingly critical feature of modern cloud database systems, enabling administrators to set granular access policies on their data. AWS customers want to define row or column filtering on their blob storage data and access it using popular tools such as Apache Spark. AWS EMR provides a managed and serverless solution that lets users run Spark jobs in the AWS cloud with imperative and declarative programming against their data, while securely enforcing the fine-grained access controls defined on those datasets. Spark runs its compiler and scheduler alongside the user application and embeds user-defined functions in query plans, giving a threat actor direct access to its memory space. This introduces attack vectors such as information disclosure or privilege escalation during policy enforcement, in addition to well-researched threats such as SQL side channel attacks. In this paper, we present Membrane: a novel approach to secure query plans with declarative and imperative code. The innovation comes from splitting the Spark driver in two in order to rewrite query plans with security boundaries while avoiding traditional tradeoffs when using container isolation techniques. The approach described herein enables applying fine grained data access controls to both SQL and map-reduce Spark jobs, with negligible performance and cost differences.
KGFabric: A Scalable Knowledge Graph Warehouse for Enterprise Data Interconnection
Authors: Yi Peng , Liang Lei , Zhang Da , Chen Yong , Zhu Jinye , Liu Xiangyu , Tang Kun , Chen Jialin , Lin Hao , Qiu Leijie , Zhou Jun
Published: November 2024

Based on the diversified application scenarios at Ant Group, we built the Ant Knowledge Graph Platform (AKGP). It has constructed numerous domain-specific knowledge graphs related to merchants, companies, accounts, products, and more. AKGP manages trillions of structured knowledge graphs, serving search, recommendation, risk control and other businesses. However, as the demand increasing for various workloads such as graph pattern matching, graph representation learning, and cross-domain knowledge reuse, the existing warehouse systems based on relational DBMS or graph databases are unable to meet the requirements. To address these issues, we propose KGFabric, an industrial-scale knowledge graph management system built on the distributed file system (DFS). KGFabric offers a nearline knowledge storage engine that utilizes a Semantic-enhanced Programmable Graph (SPG) model, which is compatible with the Labeled Property Graph (LPG) model. The data is persistently stored in DFS, such as HDFS, which leverages the POSIX file system API, making it suitable for deployment in multi-cloud environment at low cost. KGFabric provides a native graph-based and hybrid storage format that can serve as a shared backend for parallel graph computing systems, significantly accelerating the analysis of multi-workload. Additionally, KGFabric includes a graph fabric framework that minimizes data duplication and guarantees data security.

KGFabric is able to manage Peta-scale data and has supported graph fabric and analysis with over 100 billion relations at Ant Group. We conduct experiments on various datasets to evaluate the performance of KGFabric. Compared with popular relational DBMS and graph databases, the storage space for semantic relations is reduced by over 90%. The performance of graph fabric improves by 21× in real-world workloads. In multi-hop semantic graph analysis, KGFabric enhances performance by 100×.
Galaxybase: A High Performance Native Distributed Graph Database for HTAP
Authors: Tong Bing , Zhou Yan , Zhang Chen , Tang Jianheng , Tang Jing , Yang Leihong , Li Qiye , Lin Manwu , Bao Zhongxin , Li Jia , Chen Lei
Published: November 2024

We introduce Galaxybase, a native distributed graph database that addresses the increasing demands for processing large volumes of graph data in diverse industries like finance, manufacturing, and government. Designed to handle the requirements of both transactional and analytical workloads, Galaxybase stands out with its novel data storage and transaction mechanisms. At its core, Galaxybase utilizes a Log-Structured Adjacency List coupled with an Edge Page structure, optimizing read-write operations across a spectrum of tasks such as graph traversals and single edge queries. A notable aspect of Galaxybase is its execution of custom distributed transaction modes tailored for HTAP transactions, allowing for the facilitation of bidirectional and interactive transactions. It ensures data integrity and minimal latency while enabling simultaneous processing of OLTP and OLAP workloads without blocking. Experimental results show that Galaxybase achieves high throughput and low latency in both OLTP and OLAP workloads, across various graph query scenarios and resource conditions. Galaxybase has been deployed in leading banks, education, telecommunication and energy sectors in China, consistently maintaining robust performance for HTAP workloads over the years.
Complex-Path: Effective and Efficient Node Ranking with Paths in Billion-Scale Heterogeneous Graphs
Authors: Hang Jinquan , Hong Zhiqing , Feng Xinyue , Wang Guang , Cao Dongjiang , Qiao Jiayang , Wang Haotian , Zhang Desheng
Published: November 2024

Node ranking in heterogeneous graphs, which quantifies the relative importance of nodes, can often be improved by incorporating information from relevant paths. Graph database and heterogeneous graph neural network (HGNN) are two main approaches to better solve this problem. Graph databases support efficient path queries for flexible path types but require manual design to combine results for node ranking. Conversely, current HGNNs can automatically integrate semantic information from multiple linear path types for accurate node ranking. However, our experiments show that they fail to outperform a multi-layer perceptron model that utilizes features extracted from multiple nonlinear conditional paths, which can be handled by graph databases. Therefore, we aim to enable HGNN to take advantage of these path types for better performance. However, HGNNs require a generalized path schema to define the structure of input paths, and incorporating each additional path type will significantly increase the required system memory and sampling time for HGNNs. To address these limitations, we introduce CompNode, a novel framework based on a new unified path schema definition called Complex-path, which is used to describe all the required path types, including nonlinear conditional path types. Then, we design a pre-aggregation method to reduce the required system memory and sampling time by pre-aggregating the same type of complex-path. Furthermore, we develop a model that combines semantic information from all aggregated complex-paths for accurate node ranking. Real-world experiments on identifying top potential high-value customers show CompNode outperforms state-of-the-art HGNNs by 20% in average precision and the previously deployed graph database method by 252% in success rate.
SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL
Authors: Shute Jeff , Bales Shannon , Brown Matthew , Browne Jean-Daniel , Dolphin Brandon , Kudtarkar Romit , Litvinov Andrey , Ma Jingchi , Morcos John , Shen Michael , Wilhite David , Wu Xi , Yu Lulan
Published: November 2024

SQL has been extremely successful as the de facto standard language for working with data. Virtually all mainstream database-like systems use SQL as their primary query language. But SQL is an old language with significant design problems, making it difficult to learn, difficult to use, and difficult to extend. Many have observed these challenges with SQL, and proposed solutions involving new languages. New language adoption is a significant obstacle for users, and none of the potential replacements have been successful enough to displace SQL.

In GoogleSQL, we've taken a different approach - solving SQL's problems by extending SQL. Inspired by a pattern that works well in other modern data languages, we added piped data flow syntax to SQL. The results are transformative - SQL becomes a flexible language that's easier to learn, use and extend, while still leveraging the existing SQL ecosystem and existing userbase. Improving SQL from within allows incrementally adopting new features, without migrations and without learning a new language, making this a more productive approach to improve on standard SQL.
Dealing with Acronyms, Abbreviations, and Typos in Real-World Entity Matching
Authors: Wu Joshua , Tang Dixin , Chalapathi Nithin , Chambers Tristan , Ciccolini Julie , Phillips Cheryl , Pickoff-White Lisa , Parameswaran Aditya
Published: November 2024

String matching is at the core of data cleaning, record matching, and information retrieval. String matching relies on a similarity measure that evaluates the similarity of two strings, regarding the two as a match if their similarity is larger than a user-defined threshold. In our collaboration with journalists and public defenders, we found that real-world datasets, such as police rosters that journalists and public defenders work with, often contain acronyms, abbreviations, and typos, thanks to errors during manual entry, into, say, a spreadsheet or a form. Unfortunately, traditional similarity measures lead to low accuracy since they do not consider all three aspects together. Some recent work proposes leveraging synonym rules to improve matching, but either requires these rules to be provided upfront, or generated prior to matching, which leads to low accuracy in our setting and similar ones. To address these limitations, we propose Smash, a simple yet effective measure to assess the similarity of two strings with acronyms, abbreviations, and typos, all without relying on synonym rules. We design a dynamic programming algorithm to efficiently compute this measure, along with two optimizations that improve accuracy. We show that compared to the best baselines, including one based on ChatGPT with GPT-4, Smash improves the max and mean F-score by 23.5% and 110.8%, respectively. We implement Smash in OpenRefine, a graphical data cleaning tool, to facilitate its use by journalists, public defenders, and other non-programmers for data cleaning.
DLRover-RM: Resource Optimization for Deep Recommendation Models Training in the Cloud
Authors: Wang Qinlong , Lan Tingfeng , Tang Yinghao , Sang Bo , Huang Ziling , Du Yiheng , Zhang Haitao , Sha Jian , Lu Hui , Zhou Yuanchun , Zhang Ke , Tang Mingjie
Published: November 2024

Deep learning recommendation models (DLRM) rely on large embedding tables to manage categorical sparse features. Expanding such embedding tables can significantly enhance model performance, but at the cost of increased GPU/CPU/memory usage. Meanwhile, tech companies have built extensive cloud-based services to accelerate training DLRM models at scale. In this paper, we conduct a deep investigation of the DLRM training platforms at AntGroup and reveal two critical challenges:
low resource utilization
due to suboptimal configurations by users and
the tendency to encounter abnormalities
due to an unstable cloud environment. To overcome them, we introduce DLRover, an elastic training framework for DLRMs designed to increase resource utilization and handle the instability of a cloud environment. DLRover develops a resource-performance model by considering the unique characteristics of DLRMs and a three-stage heuristic strategy to automatically allocate and dynamically adjust resources for DLRM training jobs for higher resource utilization. Further, DLRover develops multiple mechanisms to ensure efficient and reliable execution of DLRM training jobs. Our extensive evaluation shows that DLRover reduces job completion times by 31%, increases the job completion rate by 6%, enhances CPU usage by 15%, and improves memory utilization by 20%, compared to state-of-the-art resource scheduling frameworks. DLRover has been widely deployed at AntGroup and processes thousands of DLRM training jobs on a daily basis. DLRover is open-sourced and has been adopted by 10+ companies.
Petabyte-Scale Row-Level Operations in Data Lakehouses
Authors: Okolnychyi Anton , Sun Chao , Tanimura Kazuyuki , Spitzer Russell , Blue Ryan , Ho Szehon , Gu Yufei , Lakkundi Vishwanath , Tsai DB
Published: November 2024

Data lakehouses combine the almost infinite scale and diverse tooling of a data lake with the reliability and functionality of a data warehouse. This paper presents extensions that enhance data lake-houses using Apache Iceberg and Apache Spark with performant petabyte-scale row-level operations. The framework is capable of handling both high-density and sparse modifications by either materializing changes at the file level during writes or producing equality and position deletes that are lazily merged with existing data during reads. The paper also outlines essential improvements in determining and applying row-level changes: eliminating expensive shuffles with storage-partitioned joins, minimizing write amplification with runtime filtering, and optimizing the layout of output data with adaptive writes. Our evaluation demonstrates the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various materialization strategies, highlighting the use cases that require each technique. We also show an order of magnitude improvement in performance after our enhancements.
Simple (yet Efficient) Function Authoring for Vectorized Engines
Authors: Sakka Laith , Pedreira Pedro , Erling Orri , Basmanova Masha , Wilfong Kevin , He Wei , Meng Xiaoxuan , Pai Krishna , Vig Bikramjeet
Published: November 2024

Vectorized execution engines process large datasets by decomposing computations into concise (tight) loops, which can be more efficiently executed by modern hardware. Providing loops that are optimal for execution usually adds burden to the software development process, as developers are required to understand details of vectorized execution, columnar data layout, data encodings, and the code compilation process itself, presenting a steep learning curve and challenges to organizations building and scaling large engineering teams. Due to their large quantity, scalar function authoring accentuates this problem. In our experience building the Velox open source execution engine, we have observed that exposing a large number of developers to the complexity inherent to vectorization resulted in a disproportionate amount of bugs and performance inefficiencies. In this paper, we describe the simple function interface (SFI) created to address this issue. SFI highly simplifies scalar function authoring by encapsulating the vectorization complexity required to generate tight loops, and presenting developers with a simpler, conciser, and more natural row-based interface - without sacrificing performance. SFI also hides columnar layout details, while providing developers the flexibility to efficiently implement advanced features such as functions with nested and recursive parameter types, type variables, variadic parameters, and generic types. Today, more than a thousand functions have been added to Velox using the SFI, implementing popular open source SQL dialects and internal domain-specific use cases at Meta, and are in active production use. While this paper presents implementation details, performance pitfalls, experimental results, and our overall experience developing the state-of-the-art Velox vectorized execution engine, we believe the concepts and trade-offs to be fundamentally equivalent and generally applicable to other vectorized engines.
Consensus in Data Management: With Use Cases in Edge-Cloud and Blockchain Systems
Authors: Nawab Faisal , Sadoghi Mohammad
Published: November 2024

Consensus is a fundamental problem in distributed systems, involving the challenge of achieving agreement among distributed nodes. It plays a critical role in various distributed data management problems. This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive primer for data management researchers on the topic of consensus and its fundamental and modern applications in data management. We begin by exploring the basic principles of consensus, including the problem statement, system models, failure scenarios, and various consensus algorithms such as Paxos and its variants. The tutorial then delves into the applications of consensus in distributed data management, focusing on distributed atomic commitment and data replication. We explain how consensus is integral to these areas and present examples of research and industry work that apply consensus to data management. The tutorial extends to modern use cases of consensus in the evolving landscapes of edge-cloud systems and blockchain technology. We discuss how consensus mechanisms are being adapted and applied in these areas, highlighting their growing importance in emerging areas of data management. By exploring these cutting-edge applications, participants will gain insights into how consensus is shaping ongoing and future research on distributed data management.

The tutorial builds on the authors' recent book "Consensus in Data Management: from Distributed Commit to Blockchain". The book will serve as the foundation and reading material for the tutorial. This tutorial targets data management researchers and practitioners to equip them with the knowledge and perspective needed to innovate in these emerging fields. This includes graduate students and junior researchers starting their careers in the area of distributed data management. Also, it includes researchers in other areas of data management who wish to explore the area of distributed data management with the goal of utilizing it in their own fields.