Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,888 posts.

Databases & Data
Any year
691

The new PostgreSQL 17 make dist

When the PostgreSQL project makes a release, the primary artifact of that is the publication of a source code tarball. That represents the output of all the work that went into the creation of the PostgreSQL software up to the point of the release. The source tarball is then used downstream by packagers to make binary…

698

On Sharding

If you need to handle really a lot of traffic, there’s only one way to do it: sharding. Which is to say, splitting up the incoming requests among as many hosts (or Lambda functions, or message brokers, or data streams) as you need. Once you get this working you can handle an essentially unlimited request volume. Of…

704

How to Store Data on Paper?

How to print my voice? How to put music on paper? How to print an executable program? All this boils down to storing digital data on paper. This is also called paper data storage . Arrived in this domain from poetry, I’ve been investigating the area for some time. Here is what I found.

711

5NF and Database Design

Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com, (~3900 words) One of the goals of this publication is to deconstruct the traditional ways of teaching basic topics in relational databases. Previously we discussed the fourth normal form (4NF): “Historically, 4NF explanations are needlessly confusing”. Let’s discuss the…

715

Introduction to Datalog

In contrast to the imperative programming paradigm, declarative programming expresses the logic of a computation without explicitly specifying its control flow. That is, declarative programming focuses on the what , not the how . If you have tentatively researched declarative programming before, you have likely read…