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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 4,222 posts.
Quack: The DuckDB Client-Server Protocol
DuckDB instances can now talk to each other using the Quack remote protocol. This lets you run DuckDB in a client-server setup with multiple concurrent writers. In DuckDB's spirit, Quack is simple to set up and builds on proven technologies such as HTTP. It's also fast, which allows it to support workloads ranging…
Big data on the cheapest MacBook
How does the latest entry-level MacBook perform on database workloads? We benchmarked it using ClickBench and TPC-DS SF300. We found that it could complete both workloads, sometimes with surprisingly good results.
Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014
At Backblaze we now have 34,881 drives and store over 100 petabytes of data. We continually track how our disk drives are doing, which ones are reliable, and which ones need to be replaced.
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want
The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers actually want
How we upgraded our 4TB Postgres database
Last fall, we migrated our 4TB Postgres database from version 9.6 to version 13 with minimal downtime. Here is how we did it (gotchas included).
Are LLMs able to notice the “gorilla in the data”?
One paper that caught my attention a bit ago was Selective attention in hypothesis-driven data analysis by Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher. In their study, students who were given specific hypotheses to test were much less likely to notice an obvious “gorilla in the data” compared to students who explored the data…
CockroachDB 2.0 Performance Makes Significant Strides
Learn which performance metrics matter, why to demand benchmark TPC-C results under serializable isolation, and how CockroachDB 2.0’s performance compares to 1.1.
I almost failed to search a 37 GB text file in under 1 millisecond
... in which we check if your password has been compromised in many inconvenient ways, in a tale of destruction, obsession, and self-discovery.
ClickHouse as an alternative to Elasticsearch for log storage and analysis
In 2018, I've written an article about Clickhouse, this piece of content is still pretty popular across the internet, and even was translated a few times. More than two years have passed since, and the pace of Clickhouse development is not slowing down: 800 merged PRs just during last month!
Call me maybe: Aerospike
Previously, on Jepsen, we reviewed Elasticsearch’s progress in addressing data-loss bugs during network partitions. Today, we’ll see Aerospike 3.5.4, an “ACID database”, react violently to a basic partition.
Building a distributed time-series database on PostgreSQL
Fully managed PostgreSQL from the creators of TimescaleDB. 99.9% uptime SLA, 10,000+ IOPS, columnar compression up to 95%, and built-in search. Try it free.
SQLite concurrency and why you should care about it
SQLite is a powerful database engine, but due to its design, it has limitations that should not be overlooked.
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.
Announcing the data.gov archive
The Library Innovation Lab is growing knowledge and community by bringing library principles to technological frontiers.
A new JSON data type for ClickHouse
We’re excited to introduce our new and significantly enhanced JSON data type, purpose-built to deliver high-performance handling of JSON data. Our core engineer, Pavel Kruglov, dives into how we built this feature on top of ClickHouse's columnar storage.
The Case Against PGVector
The real limitations of pgvector in production: index choice between IVFFlat and HNSW, why real-time search is hard, pre- vs post-filtering pain, how performance degrades at scale, and when a dedicated vector database is the better call.
Bad numbers in the “gzip beats BERT” paper?
The recent paper, “Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors by Jiang et al. [ link ] recently received a lot of attention on twitter.
SQLite JSON at full index speed using generated columns
One of the coolest patterns in SQLite—store raw JSON documents, create virtual generated columns using json_extract, add indexes, and query JSON at full B-tree index speed.
Building a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python code
Full-text search is everywhere. From finding a book on Scribd, a movie on Netflix, toilet paper on Amazon, or anything else on the web through Google (like [how to do your job as a software engineer](https://localghost.dev/2019/09/everything-i-googled-in-a-week-as-a-professional-software-engineer/)), you've searched…
Cassandra vs MongoDB vs CouchDB vs Redis vs Riak comparison
The big Cassandra vs Mongodb vs CouchDB vs Redis, vs Riak vs HBase vs Couchbase (ex-Membase) vs OrientDB vs Aerospike vs Neo4j vs Hypertable vs ElasticSearch vs Accumulo vs VoltDB vs Scalaris vs RethinkDB vs Kyoto Tycoon comparison. While SQL databases are insanely useful tools, their monopoly in the last decades is…
What ORMs have taught me: just learn SQL (2014)
I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me, ORMs are more detriment than benefit. In short, they can be used to nicely augment working with SQL in a program, but they should not replace it.
Python For Finance: Algorithmic Trading
Originally published at https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/finance-python-trading
SQLite 3.32
A complete list of SQLite releases in a single page and a chronology are both also available. A detailed history of every check-in is available at SQLite version control site .
S3 Files
Andy Warfield writes about the hard-won lessons dealing with data friction that lead to S3 Files
Turbopuffer: Fast search on object storage
Inaugural blog post about the development of turbopuffer, a search engine that uses object storage and SSD caching for cost-effective, low latency search. This post describes into the motivation behind its creation, its unique architecture, and how it significantly reduces costs for large-scale vector searches…
Jepsen: RethinkDB 2.1.5
In this Jepsen report, we’ll verify RethinkDB’s support for linearizable operations using majority reads and writes, and explore assorted read and write anomalies when consistency levels are relaxed. This work was funded by RethinkDB, and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy .