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Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 78 posts.
PostgreSQL when it is not your job
( Note beforehand: I didn’t get everything. You really also have to look at his slides for the details. Thanks Christophe for posting the slides right afterwards !)
MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases
In this article I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found on the web or scientific articles. Several practical…
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…
Relational shell programming
Unix is a bestiary of ad hoc databases: comma-, colon-, tab- and space-separated tables. Think of /etc/* or /var/log/* , or of columnar commands.
Building a MongoDB Clone in Postgres
I had a crazy thought. Don't all good ideas start with that phrase? Well, this one was suitably crazy: why not build my own version of MongoDB right on top of Postgres? It sounds a little far-fetched, but in all honesty it's pretty simple.
Lying with pictures: Smartphone manufacturer share by OS
As steer and drplokta pointed out yesterday , the Nielsen diagram was grossly out of proportion, so it looked like RIM and MS were better than they were. I passed the data to steer, who then played around with R (code is in the other post), and produced the second diagram. I've tried to line them…
PostgreSQL vs MySQL: an apples to oranges comparison
Every time we see people look at PostgreSQL and MySQL on the internet it falls into a flame war fast. I think that a large part of the pr...
The Little Redis Book
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
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…
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…
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.
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…
OkCupid on Trial - 4 Month Experiment
10 fictional profiles were created on OKCupid with the same profiles but different photos to test how online dating is different for men than women.
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…
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…
World `countries` – database table for MySQL
So today, I was buzzing around and searching for a `countries` table script that I could use in MySQL database. As you can imagine, it wouldn’t make any sense to add all world countries into …
If the world’s population lived like... (infographic)
Shortly after I started Per Square Mile, I produced an infographic that showed how big a city would have to be to house the world’s 7 billion people.
Time Spent Waiting for an Answer in StackOverflow (by language)
I use about.me to show people what matters most to me.
Google Homepage Size Over Time
This afternoon, I looked at the source of the main Google page with my browser. It spans my whole monitor and takes 15 pushes of the scroll-wheel to see it all. Whither minimalism? Off to the Wayba…
Free Data Science Books
I've been impressed in recent months by the number and quality of free datascience/machine learning books available online. I don't mean fre...
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…