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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.

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482

The DynamoDB Paper

This week at USENIX ATC’22, a group of my colleagues 1 from the AWS DynamoDB team are going to be presenting their paper Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service . This paper is a rare look at a real-world distributed system that runs at massive scale.

484

Introduction to PostgreSQL physical storage

I initially wrote this post for myself, I wanted to understand enough about the underlying physical storage to be able to grasp other concepts which can affect your database. This post is probably more aimed to people with similar interests, I will try to keep it accurate but the aim is to make it simpler to…

485

I analysed 20 years of my chats

Importing 1.2 million messages from Telegram, VK, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter into a structured Obsidian vault with local LLM inference - to measure how my friendships work with decay curves, vocabulary shifts, directional sentiment, and conflict rates.

487

PostgreSQL at low level: stay curious

Yes, I know, it’s a long text, and it was my conscious decision to write it in this way. But fear not! Imagine that you read a book, take a look at the introduction and first few interesting sections, think about it and then find time to read further. I hope I’ve left enough references, so if you don’t get some ideas…

494

Distributed SQLite: Paradigm shift or hype?

SQLite is fast, really fast. On a single ~40€ / m commodity server, it can sustain ~168,000 reads and ~8000 writes per second, concurrently. Because it's an embedded library designed for client-side applications such as embedded systems and phone & desktop applications, SQLite databases have to be co-located…

495

Data first, not code first

Developers hate him! We'll cover some standard tips and tricks here, but we're not really interested in those. We're looking for the One Weird Trick to rule them all. Hopefully each trick we encounter brings us closer to coding Mecca. In the beginning The first video game I ever wrote was called Ninja Wars. Yes, that…

500

How rqlite is tested

rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, and built on SQLite and Raft. With its origins dating back to 2014, its design has always prioritized reliability, and quality. The robustness of rqlite is also a testament to its disciplined testing strategy: after more than 10 years…

501

Reverse-Engineering Xkcd's 'Frequency'

About a week ago, Randall Munroe published Frequency , the 1331st entry in his xkcd webcomic series. Unlike most xkcd comics, it's animated — actually, 5-by-10 grid of animated GIFs. Each describes a scenario (e.g., "one birth," or "someone locks their keys in their care") and blinks at the scenario's purported…

505

PostgreSQL query performance bottlenecks

PostgreSQL query planner is full of surprises, so a common-sense approach to writing performant queries is sometimes misleading. In this blog post, I'll describe examples of optimizing seemingly obvious queries with the help of EXPLAIN ANALYZE and Postgres metadata analysis.