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Upsert in SQL
Inserting and updating data with a single query.
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 159 posts.
122
Optimizing LLMs from a Dataset Perspective
Practical guide to improving LLM finetuning with better instruction datasets, covering data curation, prompt-output pairs, synthetic data, and experiment ideas.
123
MongoDB’s new query engine
SBE Article logo Discussion on HackerNews and Lobsters. MongoDB has recently released a new query engine coming in version 7.0. I was one of the people work...
124
Modern Polars: A comparison of the Polars and Pandas dataframe libraries
A side-by-side comparison of the Polars and Pandas libraries.
125
Visualizing every job in the world
A visualization of every single job in the world (or at least in the EU)
126
UK Address Oddities (2018)
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.
127
Which vector database should I use? A comparison cheatsheet
Semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications require systems to be able to save lots of embedding vectors…
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129
You Don't Need UUID
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.
130
I Migrated from a Postgres Cluster to Distributed SQLite with LiteFS
Why and how I migrated from distributed postgres to distributed sqlite on kentcdodds.com
131
PostgreSQL and SQL:2023
In a previous article, I introduced what is new in SQL:2023. Now I want to show the status of SQL:2023 support in PostgreSQL. See the previous article for details on these features.
132
Transactions Are Not Locks (2022)
One thing I wish I had understood better earlier on in my experience with PostgreSQL is how transactions and locks can be used together to provide serializable logic.
133
Clog: Making a homegrown ClickHouse log for $20 a month
There was recently a discussion on Hacker News around application logging on a budget. At work I've been trying to keep things lean, not to the point of absurdity, but also not using a $100 or $1000/month setup, when a $10 one will suffice for now . We settled on a homegrown Clickhouse + PHP solution that has…
134
ChatLZMA – text generation from data compression
I came across a random tweet, found a Wikipedia page and bumped into some smart people and long story short, apparently compression is equivalent to general intelligence.
135
Analysis of the data job market using HN job posts
I parse HackerNews (HN) “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” posts from 2013 to time of writing and analyse them to better understand the trends in the data job market with a focus on the fate of data science. Here are my main conclusions:
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Database Isolation Is Broken and You Should Care
The database zeitgeist has decided that ANSI SQL '92 isn't enough. We need something better.
137
Faster PostgresSQL to BigQuery Transfers
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Merklizing the key/value store for fun and profit
Joel Gustafson
139
Do you really need foreign keys?
Foreign keys are a bit like that well-intentioned friend who insists on double-checking everything you do. They’re often recommended as a must-have for enforcing referential integrity checks in your database.
140
The PostgreSQL documentation and the limitations of community
In my opinion, the PostgreSQL documentation is simultaneously excellent and fairly poor, and both its excellence and its shortcomings are di...
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15k inserts/s with Rust and SQLite (2021)
There is this growing sentiment in tech that stacking more and more layers of complexity to reach the sacrosanct "infinite scalability" is not the way forward. First, because it rarely materializes: you need a lot of other things than fancy tech to reach millions of people. Second, because the tradeoffs
143
Querying the GitHub archive with the ClickHouse playground
Via this comment on Hacker News I started exploring the ClickHouse Playground . It's really cool, and among other things it allows CORS-enabled API hits that can query a decade of history from the GitHub events archive in less than a second.
144
Modeling CRDTs in Alloy – the importance of idempotence
Checking my assumptions about syncable data structures
145
Kurdish Parentheses on OpenStreetMap, Three Ways
While making a proposal to update Noto fonts for OpenStreetMap tiles, which fixes an issue with Kurdish labels using ڵا , I noticed a street with mismatched parentheses and was anticipating a deep dive into the tile renderer. But the actual problem was somewhere else:
146
Understanding the N + 1 queries problem
In this post, I am going to talk about the N + 1 queries problem. While trying to solve this problem myself recently, I noticed most of the blog posts only talk about the very simple version of the problem and the proposed solutions would break down when the use cases get complex. I will try to get into more depth and…
147
Abusing vector search for texts, maps, and chess
Vector search isn't just for AI embeddings. Use HNSW for geo-spatial queries, stock covariance, chess positions, text tokens, and multi-modal recommendations with custom metrics.
148
Speedy transactions in multicore in-memory databases
This paper is from SOSP'13. The Polyjuice paper, which we studied last week, built on the Silo codebase and commit protocol, which led me ...
149
Why AutoGPT engineers ditched vector databases
AutoGPT decided to drop the support for vector databases: Pinecone, Milvus, Redis, Weaviate - all gone. What has happened to the original idea of efficiently storing agent's memories?
150
Surviving without a superuser in Postgres 16
As I've written about before , a PostgreSQL superuser always has the ability to take over the operating system account in which PostgreSQL i...