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Databases & Data

The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 4,224 posts.

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3005

Visualizing Your Ruby Heap

In a previous post, I wrote a bit about how Ruby objects are laid out in memory. Today we’ll use that information to write a program that will allow us to take a Ruby heap dump and visualize the layout and fragmentation of that heap. Ruby Object Layout Recap Just as a recap, Ruby objects are fixed width. That is…

3009

The trouble with timestamps

Some folks have asked whether Cassandra or Riak in last-write-wins mode are monotonically consistent, or whether they can guarantee read-your-writes, and so on. This is a fascinating question, and leads to all sorts of interesting properties about clocks and causality.

3012

UK Address Oddities (2018)

A few of my previous blog posts have been about quirks in the UK postal address system. As a result of these posts being moderately popular, people have contacted me to tell me about other such quirks. This pleases me greatly – I like quirks.

3023

Why use Paxos instead of Raft?

TLDR: Neon separates storage and compute, substituting the PostgreSQL persistency layer with a custom-made distributed storage written in Rust. Due to this separation, some nodes don’t have persistent disks. The original Raft paper works only with uniform nodes, but Paxos variants support proposers without storage and…