Michael Cahill

Michael Cahill is Professor of Practice in the School of Computer Science within the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Sydney, a position he assumed in 2024. An alumnus of the university, he earned his PhD in 2009 from the School of Information Technologies. His doctoral thesis, titled "Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases," developed a novel concurrency control algorithm that automatically detects and prevents anomalies in snapshot isolation, achieving serializable isolation while maintaining the non-blocking properties attractive to readers and writers. This implementation in a relational DBMS demonstrated throughput close to standard snapshot isolation in benchmarks.

Cahill's academic interests center on database systems, transaction processing, concurrency control, distributed databases, and performance optimization. His seminal contribution, the 2009 paper "Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases" co-authored with Uwe Röhm and Alan Fekete in ACM Transactions on Database Systems, has received 432 citations. This work, building on a 2008 ICDE paper that won the ACM SIGMOD Best Paper Award, earned the 2018 ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award. The Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI) algorithm has been adopted in PostgreSQL 9.1 and impacts various production systems ensuring data consistency without serial execution. Other key publications include "The cost of serializability on platforms that use snapshot isolation" (ICDE 2008, 144 citations), "Data consistency properties of document store as a service (DSaaS): Using MongoDB Atlas as an example" (2018), and "Writes hurt: Lessons in cache design for Optane NVRAM" (SoCC 2022, 16 citations). Cahill holds multiple US patents, such as US 10,977,277 and US 10,262,050 on database zone sharding and pluggable storage engines developed during his tenure at MongoDB. Previously CTO at Bullant Technology, he bridges academia and industry, and as a donor established the Computer Science Impact Prize at the University of Sydney.

Professional Email: michael.cahill@sydney.edu.au