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I rewrote PostHog's SQL parser, 70x faster, while barely looking at the code
After the success of using agents to improve query performance through autoresearch , I wanted to try something more ambitious. I rewrote PostHog's…
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 134 posts.
92
Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy
A major technological advance in DNA writing enables researchers to construct and create in the language of biology
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Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time
Postgres 19 brings native temporal table support. Shaun Thomas covers WITHOUT OVERLAPS, FOR PORTION OF, and temporal foreign keys - and what's still missing.
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Efficient String Compression for Modern Database Systems
CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools and tomorrow’s challenges.
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How We Pushed CDC into Postgres
Discover Snowflake Postgres Mirroring. Learn how push-based change data capture delivers transactional replication to your data lake with zero lag.
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Optimizing Top K in Postgres
How ParadeDB uses principles from search engines to optimize Postgres' Top K performance.
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DuckDB – Data power tools for your laptop, now in Clojure (2023)
A well-written, *FAST* data science database for your laptop.
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Pruning RAG context down to what the answer actually needs
Pruning agent context down to what the answer actually needs, while keeping 96% of recall
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British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres
This year, British Column has moved to year-round Pacific Time. How does that affect date data?
100
Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives
New metrics of AI usage provide a rich portrait of interactions with Claude in November 2025, just prior to the release of Opus 4.5.
101
The way CTRL-C in Postgres CLI cancels queries is incredibly hack-y
There are a few different reasons to hit the brakes on a Postgres query. Maybe it’s taking too long to finish. Maybe you realised you forgot to create an index that will make it orders of magnitude quicker. Maybe there’s some reason the results are no longer needed. Or maybe you, or your LLM buddy, […]
102
Statistics that live in your SQL
A tour of the-stats-duck v0.6.0: a one-shot data profiler, regression and bootstrap CIs in plain SQL, ten new distributions, and SAS/XPT imports that got 52x faster — with live Bedevere demos you can poke at.
103
Advancing AI Benchmarking with Game Arena
We’re expanding Game Arena with Poker and Werewolf, while Gemini 3 Pro and Flash top our chess leaderboard.
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WAL-RUS: a Rust Rewrite of WAL-G for PostgreSQL Backups
How we built WAL-RUS, an open-source Rust-based Postgres backup tool that reduces virtual memory usage by over 70% compared to WAL-G while maintaining full compatibility.
105
Ontology-Driven Observability: Building an End-to-End Knowledge Graph at Netflix
Prasanna Vijayanathan, Renzo Sanchez-Silva
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Postgres Postmaster does not scale
Why Postgres postmaster contention becomes a bottleneck at scale, how connection bursts and worker churn trigger it, and which fixes helped in production.
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Making Postgres queues scale
Lessons learned from scaling Postgres-backed durable queues for users running tens of billions of workflows per month.
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Native ZFS VDEV for Object Storage (OpenZFS Summit)
We presented MayaNAS at OpenZFS Developer Summit 2025, introducing objbacker.io—a native ZFS VDEV for object storage. No FUSE, direct kernel-to-SDK integration achieving 3.7 GB/s throughput.
111
There is no posttraining data commons
The LLM revolution ran on a pretraining commons that humanity built for other reasons. Posttraining consumes tasks, not documents, and no such commons exists. If the open models community wants...
112
Ok, but does it scale?
This is probably the question I get asked most about Spacetime. It’s a simple enough question, and it certainly seems like it should have a simple answer. Scaling is a complex topic, and the devil is…
113
Massively Parallel Postgres Backups
PlanetScale backs up petabyte-scale sharded Postgres databases in hours using parallel infrastructure, object storage, and WAL replay.
114
Can GROUP BY still be optimized after all these years?
An optimization that made Pivot significantly faster on GROUP BY queries with a Top-K operator above them, and a walkthrough of how analytical databases run GROUP BY in the first place.
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Lakebase architecture delivers faster Postgres writes
How Lakebase's storage architecture pushes down full page write generation to cut WAL traffic by 94% and boost Postgres write throughput by up to 5x.
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How much of my observability data is waste?
After a decade in observability, one question kept coming back: how much of your data is waste?
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Keeping a Postgres Queue Healthy
Dead tuples from high-churn job queues can silently degrade your Postgres database when vacuum falls behind—especially alongside competing workloads. Traffic Control keeps cleanup on track.
119
Jepsen: MariaDB Galera Cluster 12.1.2
MariaDB is a popular open source SQL database which began as a fork of MySQL . MariaDB Galera Cluster is an active-active replication system for MariaDB which allows reads and writes on every node. In 2015 this author analyzed MariaDB with Galera Cluster and found that although Galera claimed to offer Snapshot…
120
We built a persistent agent memory layer on Elasticsearch with 0.89 recall
Persistent agent memory on Elasticsearch: three-index architecture, hybrid retrieval, supersession and DLS isolation. R@10 0.89, zero cross-tenant leaks.