691
The Economics of Data Businesses
How data businesses start, and how they keep going, and growing, and growing.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
692
SimpleDB: A Basic RDBMS Built from Scratch
My databases class at UCLA wasn’t very challenging so I never truly understood the internals of databases. This always bothered me so I vowed to build a simple database from scratch to learn the fundamentals. MIT's Database Systems course has their students implement a simple database from scratch and it provided me…
693
Surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they are stored (2014)
Every Bitcoin transaction is stored in the distributed database known as the Bitcoin blockchain. However, people have found ways to hack ...
694
Store SQLite in Cloudflare Durable Objects
This is my journey of creating a proof-of-concept of persisting an SQLite database in a Cloudflare Durable Object. It is not meant as a tutorial, but rather as something I myself can get back to it, to revisit what and why I did certain things.
695
PostgreSQL query performance bottlenecks
PostgreSQL query planner is full of surprises, so a common-sense approach to writing performant queries is sometimes misleading. In this blog post, I'll describe examples of optimizing seemingly obvious queries with the help of EXPLAIN ANALYZE and Postgres metadata analysis.
696
Why I Enjoy PostgreSQL – Infrastructure Engineer's Perspective
Why I enjoy PostgreSQL - Infrastructure Engineer's Perspective
697
How and why the Relational Model works for databases
This is a note on, the Turing Award laureate, Ted Codd’s revolutionary paper — A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. In this post, I will review the paper and add my comments with a perspective from modern distributed databases.
698
Who Contributed to PostgreSQL Development in 2020 and 2021?
I have done a few previous blog posts on who has contributed to PostgreSQL , but I did not do one last year. A couple people mentioned to me...
699
In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:
700
Make the “semantic web” web 3.0 again – with the help of SQLite
Before the term was hijacked by crypto-grifters (and, admittedly, a few genuinely neat projects), web 3 (point oh) referred to Tim Berners-Lee's project to promote a standard way to expose and parse metadata on the web. It never took off. In this piece, I'll argue that a breakthrough idea introduced last year by HN…
701
Where is every IP Address?
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
702
A/B test improved your website's conversion rate? Not so fast
Many internet companies use A/B testing to evaluate the performance of website changes they want to make. A typical metric in such scenarios is the conversion rate (CVR) of a user, i.e. the probability that a user converts (e.g. makes a purchase) on the website. A typical A/B test setup in such a situation would…
703
Zero-downtime schema migrations in Postgres using Reshape
About six months back, I wrote a post on how to use views in Postgres to encapsulate tables and create a versioned interface to a database. At the end of the…
704
Understanding UUIDs, ULIDs and string representations
What UUIDs and ULIDs are under the hood, and how to encode and use them.
705
706
707
Anonymized data is rarely anonymous
Justin Sherman for Wired points out the farce that is anonymized data: Data on hundreds of millions of Americans’ races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, political beliefs, int…
708
Consider SQLite
If you were creating a web app from scratch today, what database would you use? Probably the most frequent answer I see to this is Postgres, although there are a wide range of common answers: MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, etc. Today I want you to consider: what if SQLite would do just fine?
709
Advent of Code Surveys: Results
Results dashboard with the yearly (unofficial) Advent of Code participant survey
710
Everything I've seen on optimizing Postgres on ZFS
Looking to run Postgres on ZFS? I've gathered some of the information and sage advice out there to give you a head start on figuring out how to do it safely and efficiently.
711
Why start a new database conference?
Somehow I am organizing a conference called Have you tried rubbing a database on it?
712
713
Postgres, Kafka, and a mysterious 100 GB
Lately I’ve been trying to learn more about Amazon Web Services (AWS) and some other popular technologies. Since I work at a large tech company, I spend a lot of my professional time using pr…
714
715
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people?
Is watching the 1984 Ghostbusters movie killing people? English adults under 60 who have watched the 1984 Ghostbusters movie are dying at twice the rate of people who have watched the 2021 Ghostbusters move the same age.And have been for six months. The chart may seem unbelievable or impossible but it is correct…
716
717
Things I learned from building a production database
In 2017, I went to Facebook on a sabbatical from my faculty position at Yale. I created a team to build a storage system called Delos at the bottom of the Facebook stack (think of it as Facebook’s version of Chubby). We hit production with a 3-person team in less than a year; and subsequently scaled the team to 30+…
718
Back to basics: Writing an application using Go and PostgreSQL
Learn how to use PostgreSQL with the Go programming language using the pgx driver and toolkit in a very productive manner. Furthermore, with the provided source code, you'll be able to learn how to write efficient and sound unit and integration tests, ready to be run locally or on a Continuous Integration environment…
719
One of these JPEGs is not like the other
“JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file. The amount of content encoded in JPEGs must be surely biblical by now. If there is one thing that is going to…
720
Breakdown of data on homeless populations across the U.S.
Many people see a homelessness crisis, but what does the data say? We examine different locations, rates of change, types of homelessness, and mental health and substance abuse issues.