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Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
Over the past decade, the timing of PostgreSQL major releases has become very predictable: no earlier than the middle of September, and no l...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,887 posts.
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Twelve years of distributed SQLite
In September 2014 I published a short post announcing rqlite. The idea was simple: take SQLite, put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data. The source went on GitHub that same weekend. As…
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Can we replace a $150k Looker with a bucket of HTML files?
(BI) Software is dead, apparently
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UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities
When timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities
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One Hash Bloom Filters
Jim Calabro
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Language models for text classification: From bag-of-words to Jev
A Visual Guide to RNNs, CNNs, Transformers, and Calibration, with Hands-On Experiments on Accuracy and Efficiency
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I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
How one unchecked login token put 17 trillion rows in a Microsoft internal analytics service within reach.
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Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
In 51,129 comments from six knife subreddits, the 5% most brand-heavy accounts wrote 11.3% of the brand mentions in buying threads, against 7.9% expected by chance. For one brand it is 31% against 8%. The full Reddit histories of those accounts are 4.5 years old and spread over 66 subreddits, the same as a comparison…
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LLM Classification Is Feature Engineering
LLMs make good classifiers but even better features
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Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
...or how to make Qwen learn query optimization via agentic reinforcement learning
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Pandas Should Go Extinct
Pandas has taken us a long way, but it's time for a new bear
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Planet Labs' open satellite feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Python sets and dictionaries can have quadratic-time performance
In Python, the dict data structure is the conventional key-value structure. E.g., you might store a list of names as keys and have their phone numbers as values. Valentin Ignatev wrote this amusing post on X: It is indeed widely believed that, in the strict sense, the dict data structure and its companion, the set ……
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Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Contr…
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P99 0 ms* autocomplete for 240M domain names
How Wirewiki's domain-name autocomplete renders suggestions next frame for 99% of keystrokes.
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RAG Is Simpler Than You Think
Six approaches to retrieval-based AI, from minimal to elaborate
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Actually Queryable Executables
I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘Your executable is a SQLite database’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to have struck a chord with others.
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SQLite as a Document Database (2020)
However recently it added a killer feature: generated columns . (This was added in 3.31.0, released 2020-01-22.)
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Visualizing Binary Files
It's all black and white, basically. A while ago, Vim's xxd gained the ability to color the output (this is not included in Vim Classic , which I use):
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A Blackstone real estate company exposed SSN digits, DOBs, addresses and more
Update: This post received some attention on Hacker News — see the discussion thread.
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Fast drilldown dashboards from a single Parquet file
Range Requests Are All You Need
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Executable Is a SQLite Database
I have been probably obsessed with two things in the last few years: Nix as a tool to explore innovative ideas that require the capability to rebuild the world and replacing ELF with SQLite as an executable format. You might have noticed that these two ideas are well suited to each other.
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Things I want in a modern relational query language
This was a very old draft I’ve had sitting around for years. The recent discussions of new query languages like Acadia spurred me to revisit, revise, and publish this. I think one of the biggest causes of NoSQL is that… Continue reading →
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One night in Uzbekistan: Why was this one data point so influential?
We have a comment coming out in Nature next week that is going to cause the retraction of a high-profile paper by Kotz et al. from last year (the second most cited climate paper in the news in 2024).
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SpacetimeDB: a short technical review
This blog post has been archived! SpacetimeDB has improved a lot since I initially published this technical review, and most of the technical details in it no longer apply.
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PostgreSQL for Everything
You need simplicity if you want to move fast. PostgreSQL can very well replace Kafka, Redis, Clickhouse and Elastic. And many successful companies are doing exactly that. Let's check out how.
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How Compaction Works in Pi
Why compaction is needed for large language models and how Pi implements it
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Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?
Almost every notable managed Postgres provider bundles a connection pooler, giving us a strong hint that connection management is a product problem rather than a user problem.
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Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD
Last week we released version 0.2 of pgrust. This release was all about performance. It’s 10x faster than the previous version of pgrust. On OLTP benchmarks, pgrust is 30% faster than Postgres, and on Clickbench, Clickhouse’s benchmark for analytical databases, pgrust is 300x faster than Postgres. It’s even ahead of…