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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
In a previous post, I wrote a bit about how Ruby objects are laid out in memory. Today we’ll use that information to write a program that will allow us to take a Ruby heap dump and visualize the layout and fragmentation of that heap. Ruby Object Layout Recap Just as a recap, Ruby objects are fixed width. That is…
A visualization of every single job in the world (or at least in the EU)
In this post, I'll describe some common pitfalls regarding the use of the 'time-travel' features of Datomic ( db.asOf() , db.history() , :db/txInstant ).
Some folks have asked whether Cassandra or Riak in last-write-wins mode are monotonically consistent, or whether they can guarantee read-your-writes, and so on. This is a fascinating question, and leads to all sorts of interesting properties about clocks and causality.
Every transactional system must execute, order, validate, and persist transactions.
A few of my previous blog posts have been about quirks in the UK postal address system. As a result of these posts being moderately popular, people have contacted me to tell me about other such quirks. This pleases me greatly – I like quirks.
My problem is not just with the methods—although I do have problems with the method—but also with the ideology.
In January 2008 David DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker published an article criticising MapReduce. As far as I can find, the article is no lon...
Semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications require systems to be able to save lots of embedding vectors…
Starting from v8.0.27, the MySQL daemon shows its thread names at the OS level too, for better troubleshooting. The MySQL 8.0.27 release notes say this: To assist monitoring and troubleshooting, the Performance Schema instrumentation is now used to export names of instrumented threads to the operating system. This…
If your app makes use of two separate instances of the SQLite library, you can end up with a corrupted SQLite data file.
An overview of optimization tricks for lists and tuples
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 …
Update 17/01: reddit discussion thread. Update 19/01: hacker news thread. The codex The Voynich Manuscript is a hand-written codex written in an unknown system and carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438). Although the manuscript has been studied by some famous cryptographers of the World War I and II…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Litigation, neglect killed dBase. The dBase newsgroup servers went off-line since November 2025. Court-smart dBase vendors and AI accelerated the fall.
Bridging the gap between stateful and event sourced sub-systems
All of the data in this page is derived from these tests , so is true by some definition of true. Notable is this test - given an arbitrary SQL statement, it determines via runtime inspection which locks are taken.
This article gives an overview of the implementation and performance of two recent additions to LocustDB, an extremely fast open-source analytics database built in Rust. The first addition is suppo…
I've experienced first-hand how using UUID hurts the usability of computer systems, and I want you to understand why you certainly don't need it.
Learn how to use PostgreSQL with the Go programming language using the pgx driver and toolkit in a very productive manner. Furthermore, with the provided source code, you'll be able to learn how to write efficient and sound unit and integration tests, ready to be run locally or on a Continuous Integration environment…
It’s funny. I’m the statistician, but I’m more skeptical about statistics, compared to these renowned scientists.
Why and how I migrated from distributed postgres to distributed sqlite on kentcdodds.com
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.
Learn how to download fundamentals data with Python using the yahoo_fin package, including P/E and P/S ratios, return on equity, and more.
