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Scalability, but at what cost? (2015)
Michael Isard, Derek Murray, and I recently sent in a HotOS submission (it’s not blind, so no harm talking about it, we think). The subject is hinted at from...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 20 posts.
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Data is a Toxic Asset
Thefts of personal information aren’t unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it’s information that’s needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS. Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or…
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Jepsen: MongoDB
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Redis . In this post, we’ll see MongoDB drop a phenomenal amount of data. See also: followup analyses of 2.6.7 and 3.4.0-rc3 .
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Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.1.5
In this Jepsen report, we’ll verify RethinkDB’s support for linearizable operations using majority reads and writes, and explore assorted read and write anomalies when consistency levels are relaxed. This work was funded by RethinkDB, and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy .
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Postgres full-text search is Good Enough (2015)
When you have to build a web application, you are often asked to add search. The magnifying glass is something that we now add to wireframes without even knowing what we are going to search.
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OFFSET is bad for skipping previous rows
OFFSET doesn’t deliver stable results and makes the query slow. Key-set pagination does neither.
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Top Books on Amazon Based on Links in Hacker News Comments
This visualization shows the top 30 books ranked by total number of links to Amazon in Hacker News comments from Oct 2006 to Oct 2015.
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On Uber’s Choice of Databases
Uber provides bad advice about PostreSQL vs. MySQL
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Natural Language Corpus Data: Beautiful Data
Data files are derived from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus , as described by Thorsten Brants and Alex Franz, and distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium.
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Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.2.3 reconfiguration
In the previous Jepsen analysis of RethinkDB , we tested single-document reads, writes, and conditional writes, under network partitions and process pauses. RethinkDB did not exhibit any nonlinearizable histories in those tests. However, testing with more aggressive failure modes, on both 2.1.5 and 2.2.3, has…
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PostgreSQL Scalability: Towards Millions TPS
PostgreSQL scalability on multicore and multisocket machines became a subject of optimization long time ago once such machines became widely used. This blog post shows brief history of vertical scalability improvements between versions 8.0 and 8.4. PostgreSQL 9.2 had very noticeable scalability improvement. Thanks to…
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XKCD Plots in Matplotlib: Going the Whole Way
One of the most consistently popular posts on this blog has been my XKCDify post, where I followed in the footsteps of others to write a little hack for xkcd-style plotting in matplotlib. In it, I mentioned the Sketch Path Filter pull request that would eventually supersede my ugly little hack.
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Audio Fingerprinting with Python and Numpy (2013)
Personal Blog of Will Drevo
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Analysis of longevity of code across many popular projects
As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project.
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Moving away from HDF5
Cyrille Rossant,
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The SQL filter clause: selective aggregates
The FILTER clause extends aggregate functions (SUM, AVG, COUNT, etc.) with an additional WHERE clause. Databases not supporting FILTER can use CASE within the aggregate function instead.
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Jepsen: Crate 0.54.9 version divergence
In the last Jepsen analysis, we saw that RethinkDB 2.2.3 could encounter spectacular failure modes due to cluster reconfiguration during a partition. In this analysis, we’ll talk about Crate, and find out just how many versions a row’s version identifies.