1891
Implementing Stripe-Like Idempotency Keys in Postgres
Building resilient services by identifying foreign state mutations and grouping local changes into restartable atomic phases so that every request can be driven to completion.
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 4,224 posts.
1892
SQL Tricks
Listicles like these do work – not only do they attract attention, if the content is also valuable (and in this case it is, trust me), the article format can be extremely entertaining. This a…
1893
How we achieved write speeds of 1.4M rows per second
The detailed story of how to build a vector-based storage model from scratch.
1894
Knossos: Redis and Linearizability
A few weeks ago I criticized a proposal by Antirez for a hypothetical linearizable system built on top of Redis WAIT and a strong coordinator. I showed that the coordinator he suggested was physically impossible to build, and that anybody who tried to actually implement that design would run into serious problems. I…
1895
Python datetime pitfalls, and what libraries are (not) doing about it
It’s no secret that the Python datetime library has its quirks. Not only are there probably more than you think; third-party libraries don’t address most of them! I created a new library to explore what a better datetime library could look like.
1896
1897
Cracking encrypted LastPass vaults
The recent (2022) compromise of Lastpass included email addresses, home addresses, names, and encrypted customer vaults. In this post I will demonstrate how attackers may leverage tools like Hashcat to crack an encrypted vault with a weak password.
1898
Battle testing data integrity verification with ZFS and Btrfs
In this article I share the results of a home-lab experiment in which I threw some different problems at ZFS, Btrfs and mdadm+dm-integrity in a RAID-5 setup.
1899
Where in the world are Trader Joe’s warehouses? (2015)
Personal website of Samuel Burer, Tippie Rollins Professor of Business Analytics, University of Iowa.
1900
Feather: A Fast On-Disk Format for Data Frames for R and Python
Introducing Feather: a fast binary file format for data frames that works in both R and Python, built on Apache Arrow.
1901
37signals: A/B testing part 3: Finalé
I was an A/B test skeptic. Maybe we don’t want to be second-guessed. Maybe we don’t want to cater to the lowest common denominator. Designers are taught—explicitly and implicitly—to follow certain visual rules and the final design will work great. The whole A/B testing concept probably …
1902
Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2016
We take a close look at the hard drive failure rates from 68,813 hard drives that are used in the Backblaze data center.
1903
Zero-downtime schema migrations in Postgres using views
Schema migrations are tricky, especially when planned downtime is not an option. Changes need to be carefully designed to stay backwards compatible so that…
1904
OpenTelemetry at Scale: Using Kafka to handle bursty traffic
Learn how to use Apache Kafka as a buffer between OpenTelemetry Collectors for a scalable multi-collector pipeline, with YAML configuration examples.
1905
CNCF's Cortex v1.0: scalable, fast Prometheus implementation
Grafana is an open source visualization and dashboarding technology that allows you to explore your metrics, logs, and traces no matter where the data is.
1906
1907
Build real-time knowledge graph for documents with LLM
Build a Neo4j knowledge graph from Markdown documents with an LLM. CocoIndex updates the extracted relationships as documents change.
1908
Which colours dominate movie posters and why?
I analysed 58,687 movie posters from the past century to see which colours dominate, how their use has shifted over time and what each hue signals to audiences.
1909
1910
PostgreSQL views and materialized views and how they influenced TimescaleDB
Continuous aggregates are one of Timescale's most popular features, but you can’t fully understand them without some context on Postgres views and materialized.
1911
Oracle vs. PostgreSQL: First Glance
We are facing some interesting times at work as we are going to start changing our technology stack in the near future. Most of our Oracle ...
1912
Postgres isn't slow, your storage is
A recap of Sai Srirampur's POSETTE 2026 talk on storage performance in Postgres, with a local NVMe vs. EBS benchmark and the production setup behind it.
1913
It's Not Just X. It's Y
Against the Quantification of Integrity When the measure of language becomes its target, it ceases to be good language. 💡Nerd Rating: 1/5. I discuss the origins of certain linguistic tics in LLMs and what it means for writing, student assessment, and thinking. "It's not x, it's y.
1914
Django and Postgres for the Busy Rails Developer
About 10 years ago I wrote a post PostgreSQL for the Busy MySQL Developer, as part of switching from MySQL to Postgres for my personal and professional projects wherever I could.
1915
Full-Text Search in Django with PostgreSQL
Article based on my talk about Full-text search in Django with PostgreSQL.
1916
Time Series, the new shiny?
If you’ve been fortunate enough to have been studying penguins at McMurdo these last few seasons you may have missed the attention “Time Series” has been getting in the Big Data space. Then again, maybe not. Because if you were doing scientific work whilst snug in your North Face you may have been t
1917
1918
Building CockroachDB on top of RocksDB
CockroachDB uses RocksDB for its storage engine because of RocksDB's rich feature set, which is necessary for a complex product like a distributed SQL database.
1919
Tendermint 0.10.2
Tendermint is a server and a protocol for building linearizable (or sequentially consistent) byzantine fault-tolerant applications. Tendermint validators accept transactions from clients over HTTP, and replicate them to the other validators in the cluster, forming a totally ordered sequence of transactions. Each…
1920
Data is a Toxic Asset
Thefts of personal information aren’t unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it’s information that’s needed to commit fraud, as happened in 2015 to Experian and the IRS. Sometimes it’s stolen for purposes of embarrassment or…