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Goodbye, data science
This is more of a personal post than something intended to be profound. If you are looking for a point, you will not find one here. Frankly I am not even sure who the target audience is for this (p…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 125 posts.
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One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite
I figured out how to run a SQL query directly against a CSV file using the sqlite3 command-line utility:
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Things to know about databases
How Relational Databases Work. This post talks about how indexes and transactions work on the inside of relational databases.
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Just use Postgres for everything
Replace Redis, MongoDB, Kafka & more with PostgreSQL. Reduce complexity, boost development speed. Complete guide with real examples.
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Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
The traditional soft deletion pattern using <code>deleted_at</code> columns leaks into code, curbs the usefulness of foreign keys, and makes data removal difficult. Luckily, there’s an alternative.
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In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)
Today’s bug: I tried to store a UTF-8 string in a MariaDB “utf8”-encoded database, and Rails raised a bizarre error:
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I found a bug in SQLite
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Recently I introduced a high-performance write-path into rqlite and, to my great surprise, it exposed a bug in SQLite. The SQLite team quickly addressed the issue but let's take a look at the…
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I put my whole life into a single database
Back in 2019, I started collecting all kinds of metrics about my life. Every single day for the last 2.5 years I tracked over 100 different data types - ranging from fitness & nutrition to social life, computer usage and weather.
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Make the “semantic web” web 3.0 again – with the help of SQLite
Before the term was hijacked by crypto-grifters (and, admittedly, a few genuinely neat projects), web 3 (point oh) referred to Tim Berners-Lee's project to promote a standard way to expose and parse metadata on the web. It never took off. In this piece, I'll argue that a breakthrough idea introduced last year by HN…
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Redis explained
A deep technical dive into all things Redis. Covering various Redis topologies, data persistence and process forking.
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The 12-bit rainbow palette
A palette of twelve colours chosen with consideration for how we perceive luminance, chroma, and hue
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New JSON query operators in SQLite 3.38.0
SQLite 3.38.0 introduced improvements to JSON query syntax using -> and ->> operators that are similar to PostgreSQL JSON functions. In this post we...
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The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers actually want
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I almost failed to search a 37 GB text file in under 1 millisecond
... in which we check if your password has been compromised in many inconvenient ways, in a tale of destruction, obsession, and self-discovery.
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Excel is pretty dang cool
It's like discovering a treasure chest under my kitchen sink
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When buying the dip doesn’t work: An analysis of the dot-com crash
When a sale isn’t quite what it seems to be
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Turning SQLite into a Distributed Database
mvSQLite is the open-source , SQLite-compatible distributed database. We decoupled SQLite's storage layer onto FoundationDB to offer massive yet "bottomless" scalability, point-in-time reads, and the strictest level of consistency.
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How PostgreSQL stores rows
poking inside postgres pages
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Architecture Notes: Datasette
Simon is the creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django web framework. Formerly he was a JSK journalism fellow at Stanford, and prior to that an Engineering Director at Eventbrite.
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Analysis of Apple Watch running data
Analysis of Apple running measurements and statistics
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TIL–Python has a built-in persistent key-value store (2018)
Simplex Sigillum Veri
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Static B-Trees: A data structure for faster binary search
This section is a follow-up to the previous one , where we optimized binary search by the means of removing branching and improving the memory layout. Here, we will also be searching in sorted arrays, but this time we are not limited to fetching and comparing only one element at a time.
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Pretty maps in Python
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Moving Away from UUIDs (2018)
If you need an unguessable random string (for a session cookie or access token, for example), it can be tempting to reach for a random UUID, which looks like this: 88cf3e49-e28e-4c0e-b95f-6a68a785a…
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Monarch: Google’s Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
These paper reviews can be delivered weekly to your inbox , or you can subscribe to the Atom feed . As always, feel free to reach out on Twitter with feedback or suggestions!
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For Want of a JOIN
Once upon a time, I was on a small team tasked with building a data pipeline. On this team was someone we’ll call Bob, who was fresh out of grad school and hadn’t had much experience with software engineering, and no experience with SQL. As part of this data pipeline, Bob had to combine the data from two tables. JOIN…
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In Defense of OpenStreetMap's Data Model
Who's the customer, anyway?
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Airflow's Problem
In 2022, data engineers manage forests, not trees