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Call me maybe: Redis redux
In a recent blog post , antirez detailed a new operation in Redis: WAIT . WAIT is proposed as an enhancement to Redis’ replication protocol to reduce the window of data loss in replicated Redis systems; clients can block awaiting acknowledgement of a write to a given number of nodes (or time out if the given threshold…
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More on Postgres Performance
If you missed my previous post on Understanding Postgres Performance its a great starting point. On this particular post I’m going to dig in to some real life examples of optimizing queries and indexes. It all starts with stats I wrote about some of the great new features in Postgres 9.2 in the recent announcement on…
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How I work with Postgres – psql, My PostgreSQL Admin
On at least a weekly basis and not uncommonly multiple times in a single week I get this question: @neilmiddleton I’ve been hunting for a nice PG interface that works within other things. PGAdmin kinda works, except the SQL editor is a piece of shit Sometimes it leans more to, what is the Sequel Pro equivilant for…
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Principal Component Analysis for Dummies
(I recently wrote a new post that you may also find interesting called Principal Component Analysis 4 Philosophers) Having been in the social sciences for a couple of weeks it seems like a large am…
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Call me maybe: final thoughts
Previously in Jepsen , we discussed Riak . Now we’ll review and integrate our findings.
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How to make fake data look meaningful
If you are trying to trick somebody with your data, never share the raw data; only share the conclusions. Bonus points if you can’t share the data because it is somehow priviledged or a trade secret. The last thing you want is to allow other people to evaluate your analysis and possibly challenge your conclusions.
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Julia, I love you (2012)
Julia is a new language for scientific computing that is winning praise from a slew of very smart people, including Harlan Harris, Chris Fonnesbeck, Douglas Bates, Vince Buffalo and Shane Conway. As a language, it has lofty design goals, which, if attained, will make it noticeably superior to Matlab, R and Python for…
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Non-blocking transactional atomicity
tl;dr: You can perform non-blocking multi-object atomic reads and writes across arbitrary data partitions via some simple multi-versioning and by storing metadata regarding related items.
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The trouble with timestamps
Some folks have asked whether Cassandra or Riak in last-write-wins mode are monotonically consistent, or whether they can guarantee read-your-writes, and so on. This is a fascinating question, and leads to all sorts of interesting properties about clocks and causality.
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Intro to Pandas data structures
Part one of a three part introduction to the pandas library. Geared towards SQL users, but is useful for anyone wanting to get started with pandas.
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MongoDB is to NoSQL like MySQL to SQL - in the most harmful way
MySQL and MongoDB are both popular, yet poor representatives of their species
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MySQL 5.7: over 1M queries/sec on a single machine
Last week, during Tomas ' keynote at MySQL Percona Live Conference in London we announced as one of "previews" of the following MySQL 5.7 release(s) -- an over 1,000,000 Query/sec result obtained with InnoDB Memcached plugin on a Read-Only workload. This article here is just to confirm the announced results without…
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Announcing pqR: A faster version of R
pqR — a “pretty quick” version of R — is now available to be downloaded, built, and installed on Linux/Unix systems. This version of R is based on R-2.15.0, but with many performance im…
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No, ZFS really doesn't need an fsck tool
(This blog entry has been recovered for the sole purpose of repairing a link in Hackernews. This blog entry is otherwise hidden on the website. 2026-04-13)
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Modelling a Basic Income with Python and Monte Carlo Simulation
Basic Income is a popular policy floating around the internet lately. The idea consists of declaring that the government will pay each living adult a fixed amount of money every month - an amount comparable to a minimum wage job. This policy would then replace all current welfare programs - welfare, unemployment …
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PostgreSQL needs a new load balancer
We do a lot of high-availablity PostgreSQL deployments for clients. As of 9.1, streaming replication (SR) is excellent for this, and can sc...
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NYC has released data for every tax lot in the city. Here is my first look
Many thanks to advocates inside and outside who worked tirelessly for years to liberate one of New York City’s most fundamental datasets. Many more thanks to the efforts of Department of City Planning, DoITT, and the Chief Analytics Officer’s office. THANK YOU!
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