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The "missing" graph datatype already exists. It was invented in the '70s
This post is a response to/inspired by The Hunt for the Missing Data Type ( HN ) by Hillel Wayne. I suggest reading his article first.
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 165 posts.
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Google's new pipe syntax in SQL
A new paper from Google Research describing custom syntax for analytical SQL queries that has been rolling out inside Google since February, reaching 1,600 "seven-day-active users" by August 2024. A …
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Bayesian Statistics: The three cultures
A traditional subjective Bayesian will assume a data generating distribution (aka a likelihood when viewed as a function of the parameters). Then, conditional on this assumption, they encode their prior beliefs as a prior distribution over parameters. After this, they turn the crank on posterior inference and don’t…
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The Truth About Linear Regression (2015)
This is basically a compilation of the lecture notes I wrote when teaching 36-401, Modern Regression, in fall 2015 . I offer it here on the chance that it might be of interest to those learning, or teaching, linear regression. There's no shortage of resources on that, but I have tried to present the subject as though…
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Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm
BM25 is a widely used algorithm for full text search. I wanted to understand how it works, so here is my attempt at understanding by re-explaining.
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Ten years of improvements in PostgreSQL's optimizer
Ryan Marcus, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Using machine learning to build the next generation of data systems.
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SQLite Index Visualization
Explores SQLite B-Tree index structure with visualizations, explaining on-disk and in-memory storage mechanisms
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Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)
Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups is a technical post about database scalability. What caught my eye was the term . What an odd term — “sharding.” Why would a database be described that way?
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Database Design for Google Calendar: A Tutorial
Author: Alexey Makhotkin squadette@gmail.com. Introduction In this database design tutorial (~9000 words) I’m going to show how to design the database tables for a real-world project of substantial complexity. We’ll design a clone of Google Calendar. We will model as much as possible of the functionality that is…
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Wddbfs – Mount a SQLite database as a filesystem
Often when I’m prototyping a project, I hesitate to use a sqlite database despite their many adavantages . It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records. Part of this is avoiding the overhead of figuring out a…
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I wrote a new JIT compiler for PostgreSQL
Sometimes, I don’t know why I do things. It’s one of these times. A few months ago, Python 3.13 got its JIT engine, built with a new JIT compiler construction methodology (copy-patch, cf. research paper ). After reading the paper, I was sold and I just had to try it with PostgreSQL. And what a fun ride it’s been so…
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Zero-latency SQLite storage in every Durable Object
Kenton Varda introduces the next iteration of Cloudflare's Durable Object platform, which recently upgraded from a key/value store to a full relational system based on SQLite. For useful background on …
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Erasure Coding for Distributed Systems
An overview of erasure coding, its trade-offs, and applications in distributed storage systems.
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Postgres is eating the database world
PostgreSQL isn’t just a simple relational database; it’s a data management framework with the potential to engulf the entire database…
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SQLite on Rails: The how and why of optimal performance
This is my personal site, where I write about Ruby, programming, and any of my varied fascinations.
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Fast B-Trees
( This is part of a series on the design of zest . See the list of posts here .)
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Optimizing Ruby's JSON, Part 1
I was recently made maintainer of the json gem, and aside from fixing some old bugs, I focused quite a bit on its performance, so that it is now the fastest JSON parser and generator for Ruby on most benchmarks.
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Safe relational database queries using the Rust type system
New database library for Rust
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Mamba Explained: The State Space Model Taking On Transformers
The State Space Model taking on Transformers
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All you need is Wide Events, not "Metrics, Logs and Traces"
This quote from Charity Majors is probably the best summary of the current state of observability in the tech industry - a total, mass confusion.
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Does offering ChatGPT a tip cause it to generate better text?
Modern AI rewards being very weird.
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Short Message Compression Using LLMs
ts_sms works similarly to ts_zip . It uses a specific padding system compatible with arithmetic coding so that the message length does not need to be explicitly encoded.
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A data table thousands of years old (2020)
I knew that data tables had been around a long time, but I didn't appreciate how long until I read recently about account-keeping in ancient Mesopotamia.
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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…
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Finding near-duplicates with Jaccard similarity and MinHash
How do you find near-duplicates in a massive collection of documents? An exploration of the Jaccard similarity metric, and the MinHash hashing trick used to efficiently approximate it at web scale.
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Bug hunting in Btrfs
The other day I was implementing multi-threaded stat() calls in bfs . When I ran some benchmarks, I saw something that made my heart skip a beat:
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What If Data Is a Bad Idea?
Data is reductive. It objectifies. It bureaucratizes. But is it a bad idea?