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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
Help save MySQL
I, Michael "Monty" Widenius, the creator of MySQL, am asking you urgently to help save MySQL from Oracle's clutches. Without your immediate...
Anti-RDBMS: A list of distributed key-value stores
Please Note: this was written January 2009 - see the comments for updates and additional information. A lot has changed since I wrote this.
Peewee, a lightweight python ORM
For the past month or so I've been working on writing my own ORM in Python. The project grew out of a need for a lightweight persistence layer for use in Flask web apps. As I've grown so familiar with the Django ORM over the past year, many of the ideas in Peewee are analagous to the concepts in Django. My goal from…
A New Frontier in Databases with AllegroCache
An article about the future of data storage and interaction between database management systems and programming languages.
How not to test that mysqld is alive
I had a call from a new customer last week. They had issues with their MySQL server. Apparently, it was repeatingly crashing, every few hours. To have their production system kept alive, they used …
Please don't use pie charts
I don't like pie charts. I don't like them because they fail to convey information. They do that because people have a really hard time ju...
Facebook's photo storage rewrite
This week Facebook will complete its roll-out of a new photo storage system designed to reduce the social network's reliance on expensive proprietary solutions from NetApp and Akamai. The new large blob storage system, named Haystack, is a custom-built file system solution for the over 850 million photos uploaded to…
Collaborative Map-Reduce in the browser
After immersing yourself into the field of distributed computing and large data sets you inevitably come to appreciate the elegance of Google's Map-Reduce framework . Both the generality and the simplicity of its map , emit , and reduce phases is what makes it such a powerful tool. However, while Google has made the…
Project Cassandra: Facebook's Open Source Alternative to Google BigTable
About a week ago, the Facebook Data team quietly released the Cassandra Project on Google Code. The Cassandra project has been described as a cross between ...
Put that database in memory
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
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....
NoSQL Required Reading
Bioinformatics, genomics, and Javascript