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GPT in 500 Lines of SQL
A complete GPT2 implementation as a single SQL query in PostgreSQL.
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 165 posts.
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Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election
Here’s a little “fake stats in the wild” gem that I think you and your followers will find at the least somewhat amusing.
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You'll regret using natural keys
Beating another dead horse.
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Get me out of data hell
It is 9:59 AM in Melbourne, 9th October, 2024. Sunlight filters through my windows, illuminating swirling motes of dust across my living room. There is a cup of tea in my hand. I take a sip and savor it.
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A search engine in 80 lines of Python
In this post I explain how I built a search engine from scratch using python. The resulting search engine is used to search in the posts of the blogs I follow.
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All the data can be yours: reverse engineering APIs
I’ve built a lot of unofficial software for my schools, Brown University and previously Macalester College. To name a few: an “everything app” called 75grand with dining hall menus, Moodle assignments, building hours, an event calendar, and more; two unfinished course catalogs; and a university shuttle tracker. None…
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S3 is files, but not a filesystem
"Deep" modules, mismatched interfaces - and why SAP is so painful
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How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner
A high-level overview of how PostgreSQL stores data on disk, covering segments, pages and more.
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I’m writing a new vector search SQLite Extension
sqlite-vec is an new vector search SQLite extension, coming soon!
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How bloom filters made SQLite 10x faster
This is the fascinating story of how researchers used Bloom filters cleverly to make SQLite 10x faster for analytical queries. These are my five-minute notes on the paper SQLite: Past, Present, and Future
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OpenStreetMap's New Vector Tiles
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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What I wish someone told me about Postgres
I’ve been working professionally for the better part of a decade on web apps and, in that time, I’ve had to learn how to use a lot of different systems and tools. During that education, I found that the official documentation typically proved to be the most helpful.
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The One Billion Row Challenge
Update Jan 4: Wow, this thing really took off! 1BRC is discussed at a couple of places on the internet, including Hacker News, lobste.rs, and Reddit. For folks to show-case non-Java solutions, there …
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OpenZFS deduplication is good now and you shouldn't use it
OpenZFS 2.3.0 will be released any day now, and it includes the new “Fast Dedup” feature. My team at Klara spent many months in 2023 and 2024 working on it, and we reckon it’s pretty good, a huge step up from the old dedup as well as being a solid base for further improvements. I’ve been watching various forums and…
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My finetuned models beat OpenAI's GPT-4
Finetunes of Mistral, Llama3 and Solar LLMs are more accurate for my test data than OpenAI’s models.
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DuckDB Doesn't Need Data to Be a Database
One of the many enjoyable things about databases is that they generally try to separate how data is represented internally (say on disk) from how it is used. To the point that it has become the norm to not even store the data on the same hardware that is running the queries.
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7 Databases in 7 Weeks for 2025
7 databases to explore in 2025.
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FireDucks: Pandas but Faster
Introduction My main background is a hedge fund professional, so I deal with finance data all the time and so far the Pandas library has been an indispensab...
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Fun facts about SQLite
Some of the interesting and insane facts I learned about SQLite
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MVCC – the part of PostgreSQL we hate the most (2023)
As much as Andy loves PostgreSQL, there is one part that is terrible and causes many headaches for people. Learn what it is and why it sucks.
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DuckDB as the New jq
Recently, I’ve been interested in the DuckDB project (like a SQLite geared towards data applications). And one of the amazing features is that it has many data importers included without requiring extra dependencies. This means it can natively read and parse JSON as a database table, among many other formats.
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In Search of a Faster SQLite
Researchers at the University of Helsinki and Cambridge attempted to build a faster SQLite using modern programming paradigms like io_uring and disaggregated storage. They demonstrate up to a 100x reduction in tail latency. These are my notes.
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Visualizing Ext4
What does ext4 look like?
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A Canadian payroll dependency chart
Unfortunately, like most aspects of the tax system, this steadily increases in complexity, and this year with the Canada Pension Plan including not just "base" premiums and "additional" premiums but also "second additional premiums", I needed to rewrite my spreadsheet from scratch; and also very unfortunately, the…