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PGSimCity - How PostgreSQL Works
An independent, non-commercial educational visualization of PostgreSQL internals. Not affiliated with Electronic Arts.
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 108 posts.
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Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
Sadly, taking away valuable disclosure avoidance tools doesn't make fundamental trade-offs go away.
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Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
Over the past decade, the timing of PostgreSQL major releases has become very predictable: no earlier than the middle of September, and no l...
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New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
I’ve had this sense that HN has gotten absolutely innundated with bots last few months. First most obvious giveaway is the frequency with which you see accounts posting brilliant insights like 13 60 well and t6ctctfuvuh7hguhuig8h88gd to f6gug7h8j8h6fzbuvubt GB I be cugttc fav uhz cb ibub8vgxgvzdrc to bubuvtxfh tf d…
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Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.
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Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
...or how to make Qwen learn query optimization via agentic reinforcement learning
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A graph that should be front-page news
Every so often the Earth produces a signal that is impossible to ignore. This graph is one of them. It shows sea-surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the equatorial Pacific, one of the most important parts of the Earth's climate system. Each blue line represents a different year since 1982. The red line is…
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Executable Is a SQLite Database
I have been probably obsessed with two things in the last few years: Nix as a tool to explore innovative ideas that require the capability to rebuild the world and replacing ELF with SQLite as an executable format. You might have noticed that these two ideas are well suited to each other.
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AI didn't delete your database, you did
Last week, a tweet went viral showing a guy claiming that a Cursor/Claude agent deleted his company's production database. We watched from the sidelines as he tried to get a confession from the agent:
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RAG Is Simpler Than You Think
Six approaches to retrieval-based AI, from minimal to elaborate
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65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform
Sentiment analysis of 32,000 Hacker News posts shows 65% skew negative and earn 27% more points. Six transformer and LLM models tested, full data included.
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Cosmologically Unique IDs
We are an exploratory species, just past the solar system now, but perhaps one day we will look back and call our galaxy merely the first. There are many problems to solve along the way, and today we will look at one very small one. How do we assign IDs to devices (or any object) so the IDs are guaranteed to always be…
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PostgreSQL for Everything
You need simplicity if you want to move fast. PostgreSQL can very well replace Kafka, Redis, Clickhouse and Elastic. And many successful companies are doing exactly that. Let's check out how.
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RIP, Harvest
I’ve been a self-employed contractor for about a decade now, and I’m bummed about Harvest .
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Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations
Creative ideas for speeding up queries in PostgreSQL
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A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning (2015)
What is machine learning? See how it works with our animated data visualization.
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Period tracking app, Flo, found to be selling user data to Meta
What does this vagueness by-design mean for how we choose to self monitor our biological markers?
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Twelve years of distributed SQLite
In September 2014 I published a short post announcing rqlite. The idea was simple: take SQLite, put a Raft log in front of it, and replicate every write to a cluster so that the loss of a node did not mean the loss of the data. The source went on GitHub that same weekend. As…
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S3 Files
Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files
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Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination
A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Contr…
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Prefer strict tables in SQLite
I prefer strict tables in SQLite because they avoid some datatype problems, such as putting text in number columns.
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Actually Queryable Executables
I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘Your executable is a SQLite database’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to have struck a chord with others.
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Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD
Last week we released version 0.2 of pgrust. This release was all about performance. It’s 10x faster than the previous version of pgrust. On OLTP benchmarks, pgrust is 30% faster than Postgres, and on Clickbench, Clickhouse’s benchmark for analytical databases, pgrust is 300x faster than Postgres. It’s even ahead of…
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Every GPU That Mattered
49 graphics cards. 30 years. From Quake to Cyberpunk.
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I could've accessed 17T Microsoft records
How one unchecked login token put 17 trillion rows in a Microsoft internal analytics service within reach.
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New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis
We discovered that entire sections describing domestic U.S. intelligence facilities were deliberately removed from two published documents, while equivalent foreign facilities remained visible. The evidence exists in an unexpected place - the PDF metadata of documents published by The Intercept in 2016, and by The…
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Learn SQL Once, Use It for 30 Years
The Only Programming Language Built on Mathematics, Not Fashion
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3.4M Solar Panels
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...