Using Countdown Clock Data to Understand the New York City Subway
Ranking the lines by reliability, the anatomy of a delay, and a case for the $19 billion subway plan
Docker for data scientists: Introduction and use cases
Data scientists looking to learn Docker can get a brief intro and a look at how to improve your workflow
Managed CockroachDB: Geo-Distributed Database as a Service
We’re pleased to announce the availability of Managed CockroachDB, the fully hosted and fully managed service run by Cockroach Labs that makes deploying, scaling, and managing effortless.
Backblaze's Hard Drive Stats for Q1 2018
As of March 31, 2018 we had 100,110 spinning hard drives. This review looks at the quarterly and lifetime statistics for the data drive models (Seagate, HGST, WDC, and Toshiba) in operation in our data centers.
Visualizing SQL Plan Execution Time with FlameGraphs
Update: I wrote a follow-up article about adding Loop Counters and Row Counts to SQL Plan FlameGraphs. I also show some old examples of “Bookshelf Graph” visualizations there. Check it out after reading this post first. Introduction Brendan Gregg invented and popularized a way to profile & visualize program response…
Exploring Word2Vec
In my previous blog post, I explored some of the early ways of word embeddings and their shortcomings. The purpose of this post is to explo...
Sqlite – Most Deployed Database in the World
SQLite is likely used more than all other database engines combined. Billions and billions of copies of SQLite exist in the wild. SQLite is found in:
Pivot – Rows to Columns
Pivot SQL tables with CASE or FILTER. Turn rows into columns for the entity-attribute-value model (EAV).
Data Factories
Facebook and Google and other advertising businesses are data factories, and regulation will be most effective if it lets users look inside
SQLite: Infinite loop due to the ‘order by limit’ optimization
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Optimal Shard Placement in a Petabyte Scale Elasticsearch Cluster
At the heart of Meltwater’s and Fairhair.ai’s information retrieval systems lies a collection of Elasticsearch clusters containing billions of social media posts and editorial articles. The index shards in our clusters vary greatly in their access pattern, workload and size which presents some very interesting…
Translating Between Statistics and Machine Learning
This SEI Blog post explores the differences between statistics and machine learning and how to translate statistical models into machine learning models.
Two-phase commit and beyond
In this post, we model and explore the two-phase commit protocol using TLA+. The two-phase commit protocol is practical and is used in man...
Faster – A key-value store for large state management
At SIGMOD 2018, a team from Microsoft Research will be presenting a new embedded key-value store called FASTER, described in their paper “FASTER: A Concurrent Key-Value Store with In-Place Updates”. As its name suggests, FASTER makes a major leap forward in terms of supporting fast and frequent lookups and updates of…
“Stateless” sync using version vectors
Isolating cloud sync and persistent storage in an app architecture.
PostgreSQL 10: Partitions of partitions
PostgreSQL version 10 brings a much anticipated feature: (Native) Table Partitioning .
Managed Redis on Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud provides managed database services for your favorite open source data stores as well as Google proprietary technologies. Today we’re announcing updates to both.
Improving compression at scale with Zstandard
Two years ago, Facebook open-sourced Zstandard v1.0, a landmark data compression solution that offers best-in-kind performance. Since then, we’ve released a variety of enhancements and advanc…
Do or undo – there is no VACUUM
What if PostgreSQL didn’t need VACUUM at all? This seems hard to imagine. After all, PostgreSQL uses multi-version concurrency control (MVC...
PostgreSQL 10.2 Released
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of our database system, including 10.2, 9.6.7, …
Datomic: Look at all the things I'm not doing
A post by August Lilleaas, published April 20, 2018.
Consistency Models
Jepsen analyzes the safety properties of distributed systems–most notably, identifying violations of consistency models. But what are consistency models? What phenomena do they allow? What kind of consistency does a given program really need?