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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 1,888 posts.
Edward Tufte: Sparklines: theory and practice
A forum moderated by author and artist Edward Tufte, including discussion and questions dealing with information design.
What MySQL Founder Michael Widenius said about Oracle acquiring Sun
Tonight at 4:30 AM, USA Pacific time, my phone started to ring; it was a call from a Sun employee saying that Oracle has bought Sun and he w...
Why CouchDB doesn't scale
This is my attempt to clear up some misconceptions about CouchDB and point out some technical details that a lot of people seem to have over...
Top 10 Reasons to Avoid the SimpleDB Hype
The personal home page of Ryan Park of San Francisco, California, USA.
Basic MySQL Performance Tuning Practices that Everyone Should Know About
In this post I'll cover a lecture on MySQL performance tuning. This lecture is given by Jay Pipes. Jay works at MySQL and has written a book on MySQL. It's called Pro MySQL and it covers intermediate and advanced features of the database. He also has an interesting blog, which I am long subscribed to - Jay Pipes blog.
Amazon's Dynamo
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the…
Summary of the 1.1 Billion Taxi Rides Benchmarks
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data
We use MySQL for storing all of the data in FriendFeed . Our database has grown a lot as our user base has grown. We now store over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.
Jepsen: On the perils of network partitions
This article is part of Jepsen , a series on network partitions. We’re going to learn about distributed consensus, discuss the CAP theorem’s implications, and demonstrate how different databases behave under partition.
Jepsen: Postgres
Previously on Jepsen , we introduced the problem of network partitions . Here, we demonstrate that a few transactions which “fail” during the start of a partition may have actually succeeded.
Why everything you have said about the determinants of health expenditure is wrong in one million charts: a response to Noah Smith.
Household income determines health spending, mostly via higher intensity, not prices. US behaviors are consistent with well-measured income in multiple dimensions.
Percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women, by major (1970-2012)
Randy Olson charts out the percentage of Bachelor's degrees conferred to women (by major) and makes some startling findings.
Average IQ of students by college major and gender ratio
Randy Olson charts out the IQ of students by their major's gender ratio and reveals a startling trend.
Will ZFS and non-ECC RAM kill your data?
This comes up far too often, so rather than continuing to explain it over and over again, I’m going to try to do a really good job of it once and link to it here.
Waiting for PostgreSQL 12 – Allow user control of CTE materialization, and change the default behavior.
This is pretty important change, as it has the chance to cause performance issues in some cases.
We need tool support for keyset pagination
Pagination without OFFSET has many benefits but one problem: there is no tool support. Please help changing this.
Jepsen: Redis
Previously on Jepsen , we explored two-phase commit in Postgres . In this post, we demonstrate Redis losing 56% of writes during a partition.
[109] Data Falsificada (Part 1): “Clusterfake”
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
OFFSET is bad for skipping previous rows
OFFSET doesn’t deliver stable results and makes the query slow. Key-set pagination does neither.
Target didn’t figure out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did
And that one article that said they did was silly and bad
Object-Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
I had an opportunity to meet Ted Neward at TechEd this year. Ted, among other things, famously coined the phrase “Object-Relational mapping is the Vietnam of our industy” in late 2004. It’s a scary analogy, but an apt one. I’ve seen developers struggle for years with the
Jepsen: MongoDB
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Redis . In this post, we’ll see MongoDB drop a phenomenal amount of data. See also: followup analyses of 2.6.7 and 3.4.0-rc3 .