Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 265 posts.

Databases & Data
2018
121

Problems with CSVs (2016)

Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.

140

Postgres indexes under the hood

Many software engineers use database indexes every day, but few of us really understand how they work. In this post I’ll explain: How indexing works in Postgres using B-Trees What B-Trees are Why they are a good fit for this problem Indexes in Postgres Postgres actually offers 4 different kinds of indexes for…