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Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations
Creative ideas for speeding up queries in PostgreSQL
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 242 posts.
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Ubiquiti: Enterprise NAS, Built on ZFS
Discover ENAS, the license-free enterprise storage platform featuring native ZFS, secure UniFi management, scalable petabyte-class capacity, multi-site backups, and shared iSCSI storage for modern business infrastructure.
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RIP, vector database
turbopuffer is pushing the frontier of search. To do that, we have to fundamentally redesign our storage architecture so the vector index is no longer primary.
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Pre-Release of Polars 2.0
Preview of Python Polars 2.0, bringing the streaming engine to all lazy queries
35
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?
37
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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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…
39
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.
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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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RIP, Harvest
I’ve been a self-employed contractor for about a decade now, and I’m bummed about Harvest .
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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY actually scales
How we optimized Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY-backed data streams to 60K writes per second on a single Postgres server, with millisecond-scale latency.
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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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What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable
Sound economic planning and policymaking requires trustworthy data. Private data can serve as a complement but not fully replace official U.S. statistics.
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Jepsen: ParticleDB 1.1.4
Modern applications often spread state across a variety of systems: databases, caches, queues, data warehouses, search indices, and so on. Coordinating these systems is challenging: caches are often stale, the analytics platform might lag days behind the primary database, the search index might lose data, and…
48
Prefer strict tables in SQLite
I prefer strict tables in SQLite because they avoid some datatype problems, such as putting text in number columns.
49
Building durable workflows on Postgres
Explaining the concept of a Postgres-backed durable execution system like DBOS and comparing it to external workflow orchestration systems like Temporal.
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Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users
An inside look at how OpenAI scaled PostgreSQL to millions of queries per second using replicas, caching, rate limiting, and workload isolation.
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We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled
How we used SKIP LOCKED, composite primary keys, and connection visibility to hit our scale targets.
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Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
SpaceXAI returns to the intelligence frontier with strengths in agentic performance and cost efficiency
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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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Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs
I am excited to announce that I am joining ClickHouse, Inc. to establish and lead a new research team at ClickHouse Labs.
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Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5
Google’s Gemini 4 Carbon is the new #1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5, and second only to Claude Opus 5.5 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index
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Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence
We introduce "observed exposure," combining LLM capability with real Claude usage data, and share early evidence on employment effects.
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Every GPU That Mattered
49 graphics cards. 30 years. From Quake to Cyberpunk.
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Ten years of ClickHouse in open source
ClickHouse was released in open source on Jun 15 2016, ten years ago. Since then, it became the most popular open source analytical database with more than 2000 contributors.