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The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 242 posts.
There are a few different reasons to hit the brakes on a Postgres query. Maybe it’s taking too long to finish. Maybe you realised you forgot to create an index that will make it orders of magnitude quicker. Maybe there’s some reason the results are no longer needed. Or maybe you, or your LLM buddy, […]
Linux 7.0 delivered roughly half the throughput of Linux 6.x on the same hardware and workload.
In a previous post, I was sceptical about using Apache DataFusion for graph analytics. However, after some thought and experimentation, I changed my mind. I have reconsidered my approach and now have a working implementation of basic graph algorithms, such as WCC, PageRank and MSSP. For example, I can identify weakly…
A tour of the-stats-duck v0.6.0: a one-shot data profiler, regression and bootstrap CIs in plain SQL, ten new distributions, and SAS/XPT imports that got 52x faster — with live Bedevere demos you can poke at.
Found yourself on a data project and have no idea what they all are talking about? Feel excluded from all the fun discussions in the office kitchen? If only there were a humongous guide going over all the concepts and buzzwords...
It's all black and white, basically. A while ago, Vim's xxd gained the ability to color the output (this is not included in Vim Classic , which I use):
(BI) Software is dead, apparently
We’re expanding Game Arena with Poker and Werewolf, while Gemini 3 Pro and Flash top our chess leaderboard.
TLDR: Spanish traders in the 1600s did not want to count their thumbs, which influenced GnuCash's database design choices in 1997. Much like a horse's arse set the standard for railways . How seemingly odd design turns out to be a genius solution that serves people pretty well.
How we built WAL-RUS, an open-source Rust-based Postgres backup tool that reduces virtual memory usage by over 70% compared to WAL-G while maintaining full compatibility.
Prasanna Vijayanathan, Renzo Sanchez-Silva
Litigation, neglect killed dBase. The dBase newsgroup servers went off-line since November 2025. Court-smart dBase vendors and AI accelerated the fall.
Why Postgres postmaster contention becomes a bottleneck at scale, how connection bursts and worker churn trigger it, and which fixes helped in production.
Something I didn't understand for a while is that the process of turning row-oriented data into column-oriented data isn't a totally bespoke, foreign concept...
Lessons learned from scaling Postgres-backed durable queues for users running tens of billions of workflows per month.
We presented MayaNAS at OpenZFS Developer Summit 2025, introducing objbacker.io—a native ZFS VDEV for object storage. No FUSE, direct kernel-to-SDK integration achieving 3.7 GB/s throughput.
The LLM revolution ran on a pretraining commons that humanity built for other reasons. Posttraining consumes tasks, not documents, and no such commons exists. If the open models community wants...
If you're using Dapper with anonymous objects to query varchar columns, you're probably sending nvarchar(4000) parameters — causing CONVERT_IMPLICIT on every row and defeating your indexes. Here's the fix.
This is probably the question I get asked most about Spacetime. It’s a simple enough question, and it certainly seems like it should have a simple answer. Scaling is a complex topic, and the devil is…
101 interactive pandas exercises with solutions. Edit and run every code block directly in your browser — no installation needed.
PlanetScale backs up petabyte-scale sharded Postgres databases in hours using parallel infrastructure, object storage, and WAL replay.
An optimization that made Pivot significantly faster on GROUP BY queries with a Top-K operator above them, and a walkthrough of how analytical databases run GROUP BY in the first place.
Update: This post received some attention on Hacker News — see the discussion thread.
How Lakebase's storage architecture pushes down full page write generation to cut WAL traffic by 94% and boost Postgres write throughput by up to 5x.
After a decade in observability, one question kept coming back: how much of your data is waste?
We have a comment coming out in Nature next week that is going to cause the retraction of a high-profile paper by Kotz et al. from last year (the second most cited climate paper in the news in 2024).
Dead tuples from high-churn job queues can silently degrade your Postgres database when vacuum falls behind—especially alongside competing workloads. Traffic Control keeps cleanup on track.
