1561
A Case for Upserts
Some thoughts on why upserts are necessary to write reliable web applications.
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
1562
Average is all you need
LLMs will make more of your average stuff. And that's OK. Here's how average SQL beats fancy attribution models when your agent writes the queries.
1563
How multi-disk failures happen
Having seen this failure mode happen a couple times now, it's time to share. Yes, Virgil, multi-disk failures DO happen during RAID rebuilds. I have pictures, so it MUST be true!First,
1564
1565
1566
Unbalanced reads from SSDs in software RAID mirrors in Linux
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…
1567
Announcing pqR: A faster version of R
pqR — a “pretty quick” version of R — is now available to be downloaded, built, and installed on Linux/Unix systems. This version of R is based on R-2.15.0, but with many performance im…
1568
1569
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:
1570
How big are our embeddings now and why?
Embedding sizes and architectures have changed remarkably over the past 5 years
1571
Visualization techniques for different data sets
Visualizations are awesome.
1572
Your database skills are not 'good to have' (2023)
And a hateful ode to Object-Relational Mappers
1573
1574
Postgres Job Queues and Failure by MVCC
How Postgres’ concurrency model coupled with long-lived transactions can degrade the performance of indexes on hot tables in your database.
1575
Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
Update, 2017-09-25 Hi! This essay is undergoing a long-overdue rewrite. In the meantime, consider my 2015 follow-up essay, Obergefell v. Hodges: the database engineering perspective....
1576
A/B test improved your website's conversion rate? Not so fast
Many internet companies use A/B testing to evaluate the performance of website changes they want to make. A typical metric in such scenarios is the conversion rate (CVR) of a user, i.e. the probability that a user converts (e.g. makes a purchase) on the website. A typical A/B test setup in such a situation would…
1577
Your Supabase is public if you turn off RLS
I was chatting with a close friend of mine and he sent me a link to his new SaaS that he's developing.
1578
No, ZFS really doesn't need an fsck tool
(This blog entry has been recovered for the sole purpose of repairing a link in Hackernews. This blog entry is otherwise hidden on the website. 2026-04-13)
1579
1580
Why I like Redis
I’ve been getting a lot of useful work done with Redis recently. Redis is typically categorised as yet another of those new-fangled NoSQL key/value stores, but if you look closer …
1581
How Numba and Cython speed up Python code
A high-level overview of Numba and Cython architectures
1582
1583
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger Version of Uber H3 in Rust
Since this article will probably have more reach than my usual rambling, It'll be written in English (but let's not make a habit of it).
1584
How to build vector tiles from scratch
Building MVT tiles from scratch
1585
MySQL Text vs. Varchar Performance
Starting with MySQL 5.0.3, the maximum field length for VARCHAR fields was increased from 255 characters to 65,535 characters. This is good news, as VARCHAR fields, as opposed to TEXT fields, are stored in-row for the MyISAM storage engine (InnoDB has different characteristics). TEXT and BLOB fields are not stored…
1586
How Powerful Are Microsoft Azure’s Free Jupyter Notebooks?
For a while now, Microsoft have provided a free Jupyter Notebook service on Microsoft Azure. At the moment they provide compute kernels for Python, R and F# providing up to 4Gb of memory per sessio…
1587
An Introduction to Hierarchical Modeling
A visual explanation of multi-level modeling
1588
The Perilous World of Machine Learning for Fun and Profit
john-foreman.com is your first and best source for information about john foreman. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
1589
VisiData in 60 Seconds
Download faa-wildlife-strikes.csv , a dataset of all aircraft-wildlife collisions reported to the Federal Aviation Administration between 2010 and mid-2016.
1590