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Build your own SQLite, Part 1: Listing tables
As developers, we use databases all the time. But how do they work? In this series, we'll try to answer that question by building our own SQLite-compatible…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,888 posts.
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Database mocks are not worth it
Testing against a real database uncovers hidden pitfalls that can appear as the application matures
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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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If All You Have Is a Database, Everything Looks Like a Nail
Databases are fabulous resources. Of course, we’ll abuse them in ways that cause challenges.
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GoodJob – a Postgres-based ActiveJob back end for Ruby on Rails
GoodJob is a new Postgres-based, multithreaded, second-generation ActiveJob backend for Ruby on Rails.
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Wikidata or Scraping Wikipedia
Yesterday I was pointed to a blog post describing how to answer an interesting project: how many generations from Alfred the Great to Elizabeth II ? Alfred the Great was a king in England at the end of the 9th century, and Elizabeth II is the current Queen of England (and a bit more).
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Building a Durable Execution Engine with SQLite
Lately, there has been a lot of excitement around Durable Execution (DE) engines. The basic idea of DE is to take (potentially long-running) multi-step workflows, such as processing a purchase order …
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Sampling with SQL
Sampling is one of the most powerful tools you can wield to extract meaning from large datasets. It lets you reduce a massive pile of data into a small yet representative dataset that’s fast and easy to use.
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The Federalist Papers: Author Identification Through K-Means Clustering
Using K-means clustering on writing style to classify disputed Federalist Papers authorship.
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SQL reserved words – An empirical list
These words cause problems as table or column name
884
CTEs as lookup tables
How to use a CTE instead of complicated CASE expressions
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A Graph-Based Firebase
In A Database in the Browser , I wrote that the schleps we face as UI engineers are actually database problems in disguise [1] . This begged the question: would a database-looking solution solve them?
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Exploratory data analysis for humanities data
The course was very much an experiment, an attempt to combine literary study with computing. The 17 surviving students were largely sophomores. About two thirds of them were hard-core humanities majors; the rest were potential or actual CS majors or other STEM concentrators. The class met once a week for three hours…
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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…
889
Bayesian statistics for confused data scientists
A gentle introduction to Bayesian statistics for data scientists who, like me, are confused by it.
890
Systematically Improving Your RAG
Discover systematic strategies to enhance your Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for better performance and user experience.
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New Machine Learning Gems for Ruby
In August, I set out to improve the machine learning ecosystem for Ruby and wasn’t sure where it would go. Over the next 5 months, I ended up...
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Ban 1+N in Django
I always thought of 1+N as a thing that you just keep in your head, catch on code reviews or via performance regressions. This worked well for a long …
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On moving from statistics to machine learning, the final stage of grief (2019)
I’ve spent the last few months preparing for and applying for data science jobs. It’s possible the data science world may reject me and my lack of both experience and a credential above…
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How Python became the language of choice for data science
Nowadays Python is probably the programming language of choice (besides R) for data scientists for prototyping, visualization, and running data analyses on small and medium sized data sets. And...
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What interests Reddit? A network analysis of 84M comments by 200K users
Reddit.com is a popular social media and news aggregation site. Here I analyze over 80 million comments by 200K redditors to discover what topics interest them.
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Listen to Database Changes Through the Postgres WAL
An in-depth guide to listening to Postgres database changes through the WAL. Covers logical replication, publications, replication slots, and an Elixir implementation.
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Anonymous Correctly Predict The De-listing $1B Company
" Anonymous " has a new project called Anonymous Analytics , which recently predicted that a Hong Kong company, Chaoda Modern Agriculture h...
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Index Merges vs. Composite Indexes in Postgres and MySQL
Composite indexes aka multi-column indexes are about 10x faster than index merges. In Postgres, the gap is larger than in MySQL because Postgres doesn’t support index-only scans for queries that involve index merges.