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Databases & Data

The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 78 posts.

2012
35

Understanding Postgres Performance

Update theres a more recent post that expands further on where to start optimizing specific queries, and of course if you want to dig into optimizing your infrastructure High Performance PostgreSQL is still a great read For many application developers their database is a black box. Data goes in, comes back out and in…

43

Why Use Postgres - Part 2

This post is a list of many of the reasons to use Postgres, much this content as well as how to use these features will later be curated within PostgresGuide.com. If you need to get started check out Postgres.app for Mac, or get a Cloud instance at Heroku Postgres for free Last week I did a post on the many reasons to…

45

A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB

Amazon’s recent release of DynamoDB, a database whose name is inspired by Dynamo, the key-value database the distributed datastore they’ve been running in production for a good five to six years now. I think it’s great they’ve finally done it, though from my obverservations, there’s little resemblance of what the…

47

I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years

A few weeks ago I wrote a small app that fetches JSON documents from app.net’s API and draws a word cloud . At first I wasn’t keeping the content around after generating the images. Later I thought of other things I’d like to do with the documents, so I decided to start storing them.

50

Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

In 2010ish, we tried to roll out a feature ( Treasury ) using MongoDB. It was an interesting experience. I learned quite a bit in the process. I wrote about what I was thinking at the time here . But for the most part it was an abject failure and Ryan Young wound up porting the entire thing to the MySQL shards which…

52

Don't use Scatterplots

In a series of blog posts, Gary Rubinstein attempts show that the Value Added Modelling scores recently released by the NYC Department of Education prove that VAM (Value Added Modelling) is not accurate. However, whatever flaws VAM may have, Gary Rubinstein (henceforth GR) hasn't demonstrated them. All he has…

53

New Data Science Certificate Program

Starting in the fall of 2012, the University of Washington will be offering a certificate in Data Science . The program has two sections: one located in Seattle and the other online. The certificate consists of three separate courses each lasting approximately 3 months. Thus the program can be completed in 9 months…

60

Python for Data Analysis

I recommend using Python for data analysis, and I recommend Wes McKinney's book Python for Data Analysis. I prefer Python to R for mathematical computing because mathematical computing doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's always other stuff to do. I find doing mathematical programming in a general-purpose language is…