Timestamp as a Service, not an Oracle, by authors from Alibaba Cloud, in Proceedings of VLDB this year. Watch my presentation to the Distributed Systems Reading Group above, or read my summary below. Timestamp Oracles Priestess of Delphi (1891) by John Collier An oracle is someone who speaks for a god and reveals divine knowledge. In computer science we’ve used “oracle” to refer to theoretical machines that could do something impossible, like solve the halting problem or produce truly r...
