About me

I am a software engineer at Neo4j working in the Clustering Team.

I completed my PhD in Computer Science at Newcastle University where I was part of the Scalable Computing Group and the Cloud Computing for Big Data Centre for Doctoral Training. My main research interest are distributed database systems, specifically the areas of transaction management and replication.

My undergraduate and masters degrees were completed at Lancaster University in Economics & Mathematics and Statistics respectively. Outside of my research I enjoy running, yoga, and skiing; I’m a qualified CSIA Level 2 ski instructor.

I am also the host of Disseminate: The Computer Science Research Podcast a podcast featuring interviews with authors of the latest Computer Science papers. Listen on Spotify, Amazon, YouTube and Apple.

[CV] [GitHub] [Twitter/X] [LinkedIn] [DBLP] [Google Scholar] [YouTube]

News

• 2024
  • May: I launched the “High Impact in Databases…“ podcast series. The series is based on a blog post “Most Influential Database Papers” by Ryan Marcus. In the first episode we chat with Ryan.
  • Apr: I gave a talk on “The Wonderful World of Distributed Transactions” at the Neo4j Engineering Offsite in Tylösand (slides available on request).
• 2023
  • Nov: Our vision paper “Mammoths Are Slow: The Overlooked Transactions of Graph Data” was accepted to VLDB’24.
  • Aug: Our paper “The LDBC Social Network Benchmark: Business Intelligence Workload” won the Best Paper Award for the Experiment, Analysis, & Benchmark Track at VLDB’23.
  • Jul: Two of our papers “The Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC): Driving competition and collaboration in the graph data management space” and “The LDBC Social Network Benchmark Interactive Workload v2: A Transactional Graph Query Benchmark with Deep Delete Operations” were accepted to TPCTC at VLDB’23.
  • Jun: I successfully defended my PhD thesis “High Performance Concurrency Control and Commit Protocols in OLTP Databases”. Thank you to my examiners Jie Xu and Nigel Thomas.
  • Apr: I gave a talk on “Decentralized Epoch-based Commit” at the 7th UK System Research Challenges Workshop.
  • Mar: I was a program committee member of the 7th UK System Research Challenges Workshop.
  • Feb: I was a program committee member of the 10th Workshop on Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data (PaPoC).
  • Feb: I was invited by Vaibhav Arora to give a talk on “Epoch-based Commit Protocols in Distributed Databases” to the Salesforce Database Reading Group.
• 2022
  • Dec: Our paper “The LDBC Social Network Benchmark: Business Intelligence Workload” was accepted to VLDB’23.
  • Oct: I attended HPTS’22 (invitation only).
  • Aug: I (re-)joined the Neo4j clustering team as a software engineer.
  • July: Our paper “Pick & Mix Isolation Levels: Mixed Serialization Graph Testing” was accepted to TPCTC at VLDB’22.
  • July: My paper “High Performance Mixed Graph-Based Concurrency Control” was accepted to the PhD Workshop at VLDB’22.
  • June: I launched Disseminate: The Computer Science Research Podcast a podcast aimed at making Computer Science research more accessible, helping bridge the gap between academia and industry.
  • June: Our paper “A Performance Study of Epoch-based Commit Protocols in Distributed OLTP Databases” was accepted at SRDS’22.
  • June: I co-organized the 15th LDBC TUC meeting co-located with SIGMOD’22.
  • May: I conducted (another) research visit to CWI Amsterdam, working with Gábor Szárnyas on the LDBC Social Network Benchmark.
  • Feb: I conducted a research visit to CWI Amsterdam, working with Gábor Szárnyas on the LDBC Social Network Benchmark.
• 2021
  • Nov: I was a program committee member of the 6th UK System Research Challenges Workshop.
  • Oct: I curated a selection of materials discussing transactional and non-transactional consistency models.
  • Aug-Dec: I was an intern at Neo4j as part of the clustering team.

Publications

Mammoths Are Slow: The Overlooked Transactions of Graph Data
Audrey Cheng, Jack Waudby, Hugo Firth, Natacha Crooks, Ion Stoica. To Appear In: Proceedings of VLDB, 2024.

The LDBC Social Network Benchmark Interactive Workload v2: A Transactional Graph Query Benchmark with Deep Delete Operations
David Püroja, Jack Waudby, Peter Boncz, Gábor Szárnyas. Proceedings of TPCTC@VLDB, 2023.

The Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC): Driving competition and collaboration in the graph data management space
Gábor Szárnyas, Brad Bebee, Altan Birler, Alin Deutsch, George Fletcher, Henry A. Gabb, Denise Gosnell, Alastair Green, Zhihui Guo, Keith W. Hare, Jan Hidders, Alexandru Iosup, Atanas Kiryakov, Tomas Kovatchev, Xinsheng Li, Leonid Libkin, Heng Lin, Xiaojian Luo, Arnau Prat-Pérez, David Püroja, Shipeng Q, Oskar van Rest, Benjamin A. Steer, Dávid Szakállas, Bing Tong, Jack Waudby, Mingxi Wu, Bin Yang, Wenyuan Yu, Chen Zhang, Jason Zhang, Yan Zhou, Peter Boncz. Proceedings of TPCTC@VLDB, 2023.

High Performance Concurrency Control and Commit Protocols in OLTP Databases
Jack Waudby. PhD Thesis, 2023.

The LDBC Social Network Benchmark: Business Intelligence Workload
Gábor Szárnyas, Jack Waudby, Benjamin A. Steer, Dávid Szakállas, Altan Birler, Mingxi Wu, Yuchen Zhang, Peter Boncz. Proceedings of VLDB, 2023.

Pick & Mix Isolation Levels: Mixed Serialization Graph Testing
Jack Waudby, Paul Ezhilchelvan, Jim Webber. Proceedings of TPCTC@VLDB, 2022.
[video] [slides] [code]

High Performance Mixed Graph-Based Concurrency Control
Jack Waudby. Proceedings of VLDB PhD Workshop, 2022.
[video] [slides] [code]

A Performance Study of Epoch-based Commit Protocols in Distributed OLTP Databases
Jack Waudby, Paul Ezhilchelvan, Isi Mitrani, Jim Webber. Proceedings of SRDS, 2022.
[video] [slides] [code]

LSQB: A Large-Scale Subgraph Query Benchmark
Amine Mhedhbi, Matteo Lissandrini, Laurens Kuiper, Jack Waudby, Gábor Szárnyas. Proceedings of GRADES-NDA@SIGMOD, 2021.
[code]

Towards Testing ACID Compliance in the LDBC Social Network Benchmark
Jack Waudby, Benjamin A. Steer, Karim Karimov, József Marton, Peter Boncz, Gábor Szárnyas. Proceedings of TPCTC@VLDB, 2020.
[video] [slides] [code]

Supporting Dynamic Graphs and Temporal Entity Deletions in the LDBC Social Network Benchmark’s Data Generator
Jack Waudby, Benjamin A. Steer, Arnau Prat-Pérez, Gábor Szárnyas. Proceedings of GRADES-NDA@SIGMOD, 2020.
[code]

Preserving Reciprocal Consistency in Distributed Graph Databases
Jack Waudby, Paul Ezhilchelvan, Jim Webber, Isi Mitrani. Proceedings of PaPoC@EuroSys, 2020.
[video] [slides] [code]

Design and Evaluation of an Edge Concurrency Control Protocol for Distributed Graph Databases
Paul Ezhilchelvan, Isi Mitrani, Jack Waudby, Jim Webber. European Workshop on Performance Engineering, 2019.
[slides] [code]

Preprints

The LDBC Social Network Benchmark
Renzo Angles, János Benjamin Antal, Alex Averbuch, Peter Boncz, Orri Erling, Andrey Gubichev, Vlad Haprian, Moritz Kaufmann, Josep Lluís Larriba Pey, Norbert Martínez, József Marton, Marcus Paradies, Minh-Duc Pham, Arnau Prat-Pérez, Mirko Spasić, Benjamin A. Steer, Gábor Szárnyas, Jack Waudby. CoRR abs/2001.02299, 2020.

Awards

VLDB Best Paper Award for the Experiment, Analysis, & Benchmark Track for The LDBC Social Network Benchmark: Business Intelligence Workload*, 2023.

Placed 2nd in Newcastle University School of Computing PhD Poster Competition. Corruption in Distributed Graph Databases, 2019.

Tessella Industrial Prize for Best Computational MSc Statistics project, 2016.