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Databases & Data

The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 4,222 posts.

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814

Statistical Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

You can get CS papers published with shoddy statistics, but that doesn’t mean you should. Here are three easy ways to bungle the data analysis in your evaluation section: don’t even try to use statistics when you really ought to; misinterpret an inconclusive statistical test as concluding a negative; or run too many…

815

Principles of Sharding for Relational Databases

Some say sharding is the best way to scale a database. Sharding enables you to linearly scale cpu, memory, and disk by separating your database into smaller parts. Yet, sharding is controversial. This post explores the principles of sharding relational databases for B2B, B2C, and B2B2C applications.

819

Wddbfs – Mount a SQLite database as a filesystem

Often when I’m prototyping a project, I hesitate to use a sqlite database despite their many adavantages . It seems much easier to just dump a bunch of files in a directory and to rely on the universal support for the filesystem API to read/delete/update records. Part of this is avoiding the overhead of figuring out a…

827

I wrote a new JIT compiler for PostgreSQL

Sometimes, I don’t know why I do things. It’s one of these times. A few months ago, Python 3.13 got its JIT engine, built with a new JIT compiler construction methodology (copy-patch, cf. research paper ). After reading the paper, I was sold and I just had to try it with PostgreSQL. And what a fun ride it’s been so…

829

When LIMIT 9 works but LIMIT 10 hangs

I got a Slack message from colleagues at a major partner. They’d updated their dev environment to support WebSockets, so that Neon’s serverless driver could be used there, but then they’d run into a weird issue. The nub of it was this: This hangs: This works Reproducibly, the query without an ORDER BY ran fine […]

832

YC Portfolio Stats

We get asked a lot for statistics on the YC portfolio. Even though some of these aren’t that helpful [1], here is the latest update on the numbers we get asked about the most. As always, all the credit goes to the founders. Total market cap of all YC companies: >$30 billion Total money raised by all YC companies: >$3…

834

Babelfish: SQL Server-to-Postgres Translation Layer

“The greatest force in legacy databases is inertia,” a widely regarded industry analyst once told me. Not superior functionality. Not better performance. Not lower cost. None of the above. Just inertia. Developers might say they prefer to run PostgreSQL to proprietary alternatives (and they do), but enterprises have…

837

Unix’s file durability problem

You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…