Interesting. We don't have an engineering culture, so definitely no. Did you find similar groups within MSFT?

BTW heard about this paper[1] a few weeks ago, but not completely aligned with database and probably a bit too introductory for your group.

[1]https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~awang/courses/cop5611_s2024/vnode.pd...

There are other groups within Microsoft, but they usually follow a presentation format rather than a collaborative discussion. Off the top of my head, Phil Bernstein[1] and Hanuma Kodavalla[2] run great database seminars for invited speakers. I regularly attend and have presented in both forums; Phil's crowd is mostly researchers, while Hanuma's is mostly full of SQL engineers. Different from a small reading group, but still great.

Appreciate the paper link! We like going back to the basics sometimes, so I'll definitely take a look.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Bernstein

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=9eNQbZUAAAAJ&hl=en