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Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale
Postgres SELECT DISTINCT performs surprisingly poorly. We explain why and how we mitigated it.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 242 posts.
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Tin: full-text search for Postgres
TIN is a fast, full-featured, full-text search index for Postgres
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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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Charts built for Chat
We're open sourcing dbt Charts, a declarative language for dashboards, so that even the dashboards you build by chatting with an agent can be governed.
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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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118M Queries per Second on Neki
We ran a massive, sharded Postgres database at 118.5 million queries per second, with 200k queries per second on each shard across 512 shards.
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Neki – Sharded Postgres
Neki, sharded Postgres by PlanetScale, is now available in platform preview.
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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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Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.2
We are accelerating elements of our upcoming v5 release with interim updates to keep pace with the frontier. Index v4.2 has more complex and realistic tasks, and more private test sets to prevent gaming
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Ok, but does it scale?
This is probably the question I get asked most about Spacetime. It’s a simple enough question, and it certainly seems like it should have a simple answer. Scaling is a complex topic, and the devil is…
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How Swiss tables work in Go built-in map
Go 1.24 replaced the built-in map’s bucket-based runtime with Swiss Tables. This article explains groups, control bytes, H1 and H2, probing, table growth, directories, deletion, load factor, and the experimental split-group layout.
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Pre-Release of Polars 2.0
Preview of Python Polars 2.0, bringing the streaming engine to all lazy queries
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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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Algorithmic rent-pricing litigation expands under new state and local laws
A new wave of litigation focused on violations of municipal regulations is emerging against multifamily housing landlords, many of whom are facing antitrust litigation targeting their use of certain revenue management products. The new regulations may potentially provide a simpler path to liability and the possibility…
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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.