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Where in the world are Trader Joe’s warehouses? (2015)
Personal website of Samuel Burer, Tippie Rollins Professor of Business Analytics, University of Iowa.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 300 posts.
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The Economics of Data Businesses
How data businesses start, and how they keep going, and growing, and growing.
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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…
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PostgreSQL used fsync incorrectly for 20 years (2019) [video]
About a year ago the PostgreSQL community discovered that fsync (on Linux and some BSD systems) may not work the way we always thought it is, with possibly disastrous consequences for data durability/consistency (which is something the PostgreSQL community really values).
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Devious SQL: Message Queuing Using Native PostgreSQL
An interesting question came up on the postgresql IRC channel about how to use native PostgreSQL features to handle some sort of queuing behavior. While the specific usage was related to handling serialization of specific events to some external broker, the specifics are less important than the overall structure.
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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 ...
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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.
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The implementation of the UK Covid-19 dashboard
Why and how the UK Coronavirus Dashboard team built their analytics service on top of PostgreSQL & Citus on Azure.
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Free Postgres databases for small projects
Announcing free Postgres storage on Fly.io.
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DynamoDB 10 years later
Amazon DynamoDB was introduced 10 years ago today; one of its key contributors reflects on its origins, and discusses the 'never-ending journey' to make DynamoDB more secure, more available and more performant.
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Postgres Indexes for Newbies
Samples of b-tree, GIN, and GIST indexes for Postgres beginners.
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How the Native American population changed since the last census
The federal government has counted the Native American population in various ways throughout the years. Recent data shows how the demographic is growing.
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Tricking PostgreSQL into using an insane, but faster, query plan
At Spacelift, we use PostgreSQL (specifically Aurora Serverless) for most of our primary database needs. This article will show you our optimization story and how PostgreSQL row count estimation can go very wrong.
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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.
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Why I Enjoy PostgreSQL – Infrastructure Engineer's Perspective
Why I enjoy PostgreSQL - Infrastructure Engineer's Perspective
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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.
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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...
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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:
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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…
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Tips for a Healthier Postgres Database
Craig's year end wrap-up of 5 things you can do for a healthier Postgres database next year.
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UUIDs are popular, but bad for performance (2019)
MySQL UUIDs are still very popular despite a majority of posts warning against their usage. Learn what UUIDs are and why they are very bad for MySQL performance.
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Where is every IP Address?
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Give me /events, not webhooks
Learn about the challenges of webhooks for service-to-service notifications. And why an `/events` endpoint is often preferable.
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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…
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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…
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Understanding UUIDs, ULIDs and string representations
What UUIDs and ULIDs are under the hood, and how to encode and use them.
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