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Systems & Performance
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2463

Jurassic Cloud

We live in an age of rapid innovation; Every year, there is a new iPhone, three new crypto currencies, five new AWS services, and a hundred new JavaScript frameworks. We have been conditioned to expect new shiny things, to the point where many people equate “new” with “better” .

2474

The DynamoDB Paper

This week at USENIX ATC’22, a group of my colleagues 1 from the AWS DynamoDB team are going to be presenting their paper Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service . This paper is a rare look at a real-world distributed system that runs at massive scale.

2479

Postgres 15 improves UNIQUE and NULL

Postgres 15 beta 2 was released recently! I enjoy Beta season... reviewing and testing new features is a fun diversion from daily tasks. This post takes a look at an improvement to UNIQUE constraints on columns with NULL values . While the nuances of unique constraints are not as flashy as making sorts faster (that's…

2488

RETRO is fast

When I first read Google’s RETRO paper, I was skeptical. Sure, RETRO models are 25x smaller than the competition, supposedly leading to HUGE savings in training and inference costs. But what about the new trillion token “retrieval database” they added to the architcture? Surely that must add back some computational…

2490

How does rsync work?

This post is the third article in a series of blog posts about rsync, see the Series Overview. With rsync up and running, it’s time to take a peek under the hood of rsync to better understand how it works. How does rsync work? When talking about the rsync protocol, we need to distinguish between: