FoundationDB is a distributed datastore, designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware. These clusters scale well as you add machines, automatically heal from hardware failures, and have a simple API. The key-value store supports fully global, cross-row ACID transactions. That’s the…
On December 21, 2018, the United States House of Representatives voted to enact H.R. 4174, the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2017, in a historic win for open government in the …
Data science is increasingly popular at Berkeley because the world is increasingly data-driven
This'll be my first blog post on the internet, ever. Hopefully it's interesting and accurate. Please point out any mistakes if you see any!
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 11, the latest version of the world’s most advanced …
A handy rule of thumb for creating a confidence interval for the probability of an event you haven't seen happen yet.
This summary is an attempt to shed some light on modern quantitative trading since there is limited information available for people who are not already in the industry. Hopefully this is useful for students and candidates coming from outside the industry who are looking to understand what it’s like working for a…
In my last post, I wrote about my adventure of requesting metadata for both phone calls and emails from the City of Chicago Office of the Mayor. The work there - and its associated frustration - sent me down a path of sending requests throughout the US to both learn whether these sorts of problems are systemic…
(Spanner vs. Calvin, Part 2) [TL;DR I wrote a post in 2017 that discussed Spanner vs. Calvin that focused on performance differences. Th...
SQLite does not use the Git version control system. SQLite uses Fossil instead, which is a version control system that was specifically designed and written to support SQLite.
How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild Yang et al., ICSE’18 This is a fascinating study of the problems people get into when using…
The goal of the numpy exercises is to serve as a reference as well as to get you to apply numpy beyond the basics. The questions are of 4 levels of difficulties with L1 being the easiest to L4 being the hardest.
A Deep Dive into Database Attacks [Part III]: Why Scarlett Johansson’s Picture Got My Postgres Database to Start Mining Monero
In today's data-driven world, data is valuable. Extracting insight, answering questions, and meaningful metrics from data by way of querying and data manipulation is an integral component of SQL in general. This blog presents a combination of 8 interesting, differing PostgreSQL queries or types of queries to explore…
The internet is full of dogmatic commandments for choosing and using keys in relational databases. At times it verges on a holy war: should you use natural or artificial keys? Auto-incrementing integers, UUIDs?
In the summer of 2006, I was lucky enough to be an intern at Google. At the time, Google had an internal tool called gsearch that acted as if it ran grep over all the files in the Google source tree and printed the results. Of course, that implementation would be fairly slow, so what gsearch actually did was talk to a…
We’ve all been there! You need to make a quick, seemingly simple fix to an important production database. You compose the query, give it a once-over, and let it run. Seconds later you realize that you forgot the WHERE clause, dropped the wrong table, or made another serious mistake, and interrupt the query, but the […]
Bing has made very significant investments in the area of deep learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence to support a number of different search scenarios. The Bing Maps team has…
Postgres 11 is almost here, in fact the latest beta shipped today, and it features a lot of exciting improvements. If you want to get the full list of features it is definitely worth checking out the release notes, but for those who don’t read the release notes I put together a run down of some what I consider the…
Do you like complex application logic? We don’t either. One of the things we’ve learned here at Google is that application code is simpler and development schedules are shorter when developers can rely on underlying data stores to handle complex transaction processing and keeping data ordered. To quote the original…
Learn which performance metrics matter, why to demand benchmark TPC-C results under serializable isolation, and how CockroachDB 2.0’s performance compares to 1.1.
pgDash is an in-depth monitoring solution designed specifically for PostgreSQL deployments. pgDash shows you information and metrics about every aspect of your PostgreSQL database server, collected using the open-source tool pgmetrics.
