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Ingesting PDFs and why Gemini 2.0 changes everything
Sergey Filimonov's blog
Topics /
Databases & Data
The most popular blog posts about databases & data on Hacker News. 299 posts.
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Postgres IDE in VS Code
We are excited to announce the public preview of the brand-new PostgreSQL extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code), designed to simplify PostgreSQL...
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The DuckDB Local UI
The DuckDB team and MotherDuck are excited to announce the release of a local UI for DuckDB shipped as part of the ui extension.
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Working on databases from prison
How Preston Thorpe went from a prison cell and a college program to a full-time database engineering role at Turso, working on the SQLite rewrite in Rust.
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Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database
Indirect prompt injection through support-ticket data lets an MCP-enabled assistant cross trust boundaries and query private tables with Supabase’s privileged service role.
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Go ahead, self-host Postgres
Self-hosting Postgres is simpler and cheaper than managed services suggest, with comparable reliability and better performance tunability.
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Stop syncing everything
Discover Graft, an open-source transactional storage engine built to solve the challenges of syncing data at the edge. Inspired by lessons from SQLSync, Graft enables lazy, partial, and strongly consistent replication—allowing edge applications to sync only the data they need, exactly when they need it.
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Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024
The 2024 Year End Drive Stats Report is here. See the the latest annualized failure rates and data insights for the Backblaze drive fleet.
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Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
Andy rises from the ashes of his dead startup and discusses what happened in 2024 in the database game.
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An intro to DeepSeek's distributed file system
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
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/dev/null is an ACID compliant database
/dev/null is web scale
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Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
AWS’s Sergey Melnik, along with HN commenters matashii and Ants Aasma, have identified the cause of Long Fork in PostgreSQL clusters. As described a 2013 mailing list post , the order in which a PostgreSQL primary makes transactions visible is determined by an in-memory lock. Secondaries, however, make transactions…
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How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes
Learn how we tracked a performance bottleneck to a 15-year-old Git function and fixed it, leading to enhanced efficiency that supports more robust backup strategies and can reduce risk.
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The Anthropic Economic Index
Announcement of the new Anthropic Economic Index and description of the new data on AI use in occupations
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Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale
Learn why Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY doesn't scale for high-throughput use cases and what architectural alternatives Recall.ai uses in production.
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Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O
Postgres 18 introduces Asynchronous I/O (AIO) that can dramatically improve read performance, especially in the cloud. Learn how these changes and the new io_method setting work and see why our benchmark results show that io_uring is the recommended setting for maximizing I/O performance in Postgres 18 over the…
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Kafka is Fast – I'll use Postgres
Why you should just use Postgres instead of Kafka for small-scale message queuing and pub-sub patterns. Benchmarks and practical tests included.
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Production RAG: what I learned from processing 5M+ documents
Lessons learned from building RAG systems for Usul AI and enterprise clients, processing over 13 million pages.
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Build your own database
A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch.
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A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers
Dumping a SQLite database to a text file can make it much smaller, which means you can download it faster.
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Getting AI to write good SQL
Learn about text-to-SQL techniques like context building and table retrieval, LLM-as-a-judge, and LLM prompting and post-processing.
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DuckDB is probably the most important geospatial software of the last decade
DuckDB’s spatial extension cut geo setup to two lines of SQL, and interest in geospatial data turned upward the moment it shipped.
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Visualizing all books of the world in ISBN-Space
Libraries have been trying to collect humanity’s knowledge almost since the invention of writing. In the digital age, it might actually be possible to create a comprehensive collection of all human writing that meets certain criteria. That’s what shadow libraries do - collect and share as many
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Advent of Code 2024 in pure SQL
A blog by and for database architects.
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Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip
I'm in the process of rebuilding my homelab from the ground up, moving from a 24U full-size 4-post rack to a mini rack. One of the most difficult devices to downsize (especially economically) is a NAS. But as my needs have changed, I'm bucking the trend of all datahoarders and I need less storage than the 120 TB (80…
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Litestream: Revamped
Bringing in what we learned from LiteFS
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Instant database clones with PostgreSQL 18
Learn how to clone PostgreSQL databases instantly using reflinks. Turn slow template copies into milliseconds with PostgreSQL 18's new file copy options.