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Tracking SQLite Database Changes in Git
Note : This post stirred up some interesting discussions on HackerNews and Lobste.rs .
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
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SQLite 3.44: Interactive release notes
Order by in aggregates, better string concatenation, and thorough date formatting.
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The Case of a Curious SQL Query
Languages that suffer success often have to do so by selling out and adding features that go against some of the original purposes of their design. SQL is a...
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Embeddings: What they are and why they matter
Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon. If you can make it through that jargon, they unlock powerful and exciting techniques …
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Transactions Are Not Locks (2022)
One thing I wish I had understood better earlier on in my experience with PostgreSQL is how transactions and locks can be used together to provide serializable logic.
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Causal inference as a blind spot of data scientists
Throughout much of the 20th century, frequentist statistics dominated the field of statistics and scientific research. Frequentist statistics primarily focus on the analysis of data in terms of probabilities and observed frequencies. Causal inference, on the other hand, involves making inferences about…
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SQL reserved words – An empirical list
These words cause problems as table or column name
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Why AutoGPT engineers ditched vector databases
AutoGPT decided to drop the support for vector databases: Pinecone, Milvus, Redis, Weaviate - all gone. What has happened to the original idea of efficiently storing agent's memories?
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Modeling CRDTs in Alloy – the importance of idempotence
Checking my assumptions about syncable data structures
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UK Address Oddities (2018)
A few of my previous blog posts have been about quirks in the UK postal address system. As a result of these posts being moderately popular, people have contacted me to tell me about other such quirks. This pleases me greatly – I like quirks.
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Exploratory data analysis for humanities data
The course was very much an experiment, an attempt to combine literary study with computing. The 17 surviving students were largely sophomores. About two thirds of them were hard-core humanities majors; the rest were potential or actual CS majors or other STEM concentrators. The class met once a week for three hours…
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Every database will become a vector database sooner or later
Why every database will become a vector database, sooner or later
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Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy
State partisanship and COVID vaccination rates are strongly predictive of COVID death rates even once you account for age.
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50 years later, is two-phase locking the best we can do?
Two phase locking (2PL) was the first of the general-purpose Concurrency Controls to be invented which provided Serializability. In fact, 2P...
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Batch size one billion: SQLite insert speedups, from the useful to the absurd
A little-discussed method enables inserting rows with bound data into SQLite faster than any existing technique. This novel method is then discovered to have a drawback that makes it generally unusable. The rest of this article explores how to get the best insert performance out of SQLite generally; what's in your…
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Upsert in SQL
Inserting and updating data with a single query.
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Choose Postgres queue technology
Introduction Postgres queue tech is a thing of beauty, but far from mainstream. Its relative obscurity is partially attributable to the cargo cult of “scale”. The scalability cult has decreed that there are several queue technologies with greater “scalability” than Postgres, and for that reason alone, Postgres isn’t…
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Our humble attempt at “how much data do you need to fine-tune”
Efficacy of OpenAI Fine-tuning API, Cost/Latency Considerations, Experiencing Catastrophic Forgetting, and...Getting Roasted by a Fine-tuned GPT-3.5
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MongoDB’s new query engine
SBE Article logo Discussion on HackerNews and Lobsters. MongoDB has recently released a new query engine coming in version 7.0. I was one of the people work...
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Grouping digits in SQL
PostgreSQL 16 was released last week. This is the story of a feature.
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How FoundationDB works and why it works (2021)
FoundationDB is a very impressive database. Its paper won the best industry paper award in SIGMOD’21. In this post, I will explain, in detail, how FDB works and discuss a few very interesting design choices they made. It’s a dense paper packed with neat ideas. Many details (sometimes even proof of correctness) are not…
473
Optimizing LLMs from a Dataset Perspective
Practical guide to improving LLM finetuning with better instruction datasets, covering data curation, prompt-output pairs, synthetic data, and experiment ideas.
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You Don't Need UUID
I've experienced first-hand how using UUID hurts the usability of computer systems, and I want you to understand why you certainly don't need it.
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PgBouncer is useful, important, and fraught with peril
Updated 2024-09-17 to reflect updated PgBouncer support for protocol-level prepared statements 🐘 To start, I want to say that I’m appreciative that PgBouncer exists and the work its open source maintainers put into it. I also love working with PostgreSQL, and I’m thankful for the incredible amount of work and…
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ZFS for Dummies
As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things).
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Cola: A text CRDT for real-time collaborative editing
A deep dive into the theoretical framework and the technical implementation of a text CRDT.
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Explaining the Postgres iceberg
Have you seen this legendary SQL iceberg meme? Let's talk about it while wearing our PostgreSQL hat!
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How to get transactions between almost any data stores
How to get ACID transactions between almost any data stores, with the Epoxy protocol.