The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 371 posts.
In the past few years, I've heard a lot about Avro, Parquet, ORC, Arrow and Feather, but I also keep hearing about Iceberg and Delta Lake. As a "database person", I’ve been struggling to understand all of these different things, and how they relate to Data Lakes and
“Function calling” with ChatGPT is ChatGPT’s best feature since ChatGPT.
I recently finished reading PostgreSQL 14 Internals by Egor Rogov. It is one of the great books that teach applied computer science without watering down the difficult parts. One particularly interesting topic is PostgreSQL’s execution of UPDATE statements. Updates in relational databases are inherently complex. They…
The first step in building my text editor is to implement the core API. If you’re wondering why I want to do this, the original article is here.
The Thanksgiving long weekend (23-26 November) in 2023 was an interesting one for OpenZFS, that I managed to land myself in the middle of. The short version of events is that an apparent silent data corruption bug was discovered, which is kind of the worst case scenario for a data storage system. It was a pretty…
B-tree is a structure that helps to search through great amounts of data. It was invented over 40 years ago, yet it is still employed by the majority of modern databases. Although there are newer index structures, like LSM trees, B-tree is unbeaten when handling most of the database queries.
Erik van Zwet, Sander Greenland, Guido Imbens, Simon Schwab, Steve Goodman, and I write :
It’s two years since we launched Mwmbl, the open source, non-profit search engine, on Boxing Day 2021. A good time to take stock of where we are and where we’re going. We’ve indexed over 100 million pages Thanks to our volunteers, who crawl the web using the Firefox extension and command line script, we’re crawling up…
The database zeitgeist has decided that ANSI SQL '92 isn't enough. We need something better.
Foreign keys are a bit like that well-intentioned friend who insists on double-checking everything you do. They’re often recommended as a must-have for enforcing referential integrity checks in your database.
A lightweight in-process SQL OLAP engine, powered by ClickHouse.
Don’t confuse embeddings with memory. To build effective RAG, start with a search engine, not just a vector database.
MySQL needs little introduction. Over the last 28 years it has become one of the most widely deployed SQL databases. MySQL is primarily used for online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, but is also deployed as a part of OLAP and queuing systems.
Introduction In this blog, we'll be going over some more advanced topics new in Postgres 16. Having some experience with Linux, Postgres, and SQL is necessary as we'll not only be going over these new features but also how to implement them. This blog was written using PostgreSQL 16 (Development Version) running on…
Ever dealt with glitches in a SaaS platform where your actions don't seem to sync up? That's often a transaction isolation issue in databases. Lets talk about transaction isolation and how they work in Postgres, so you can write reliable and performant code with minimal headache.
Knock knock? Who’s there? It’s me, Oskar, the end is near, did you know that? Ah, you know it but don’t know how to proceed? Let’s talk about the end of the CRUD world…
Today I will be regaling you with tales of marvelous cherry-picked new developments in AI, from Sam Altman's recent Uno Reverse incident to bear spraying job-hungry engineers.
The fundamental problems a database engineer thinks about in the shower
A managed Postgres offering developed by Supabase and Fly.io
With Ubicloud PostgreSQL, we are releasing an open and managed PostgreSQL, and cutting your cloud database spend by 3x.
How we upgraded from Postgres 11.9 to 15.3 with zero downtime
Lean and efficient MDS experience: Delivers better software engineering practices to the data ecosystem with the new local MDS stack comprised of Dagster, dbt and DuckDB which offers better developer productivity by enhancing testability of the E2E pipeline.
Undo and redo have been a staple operation of text editors probably since the first typo was ever made, yet there has not been a lot of innovation around refining the idea of what undo and redo could be. Let’s explore what I mean…
For the first SpacetimeDB blog post, I’d like to clear up some confusion that I’ve seen arise in discussions about SpacetimeDB and address some general misperceptions about databases. My sense is tha…
JSONB is a rewrite of the SQLite JSON functions that, depending on usage patterns, could be several times faster than the original JSON functions. This enhancement has now landed on trunk .
Today, PlanetScale launched support for foreign key constraints. This article covers some of the behind-the-scenes technical challenges we had to overcome to support them.
