Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 269 posts.

Databases & Data
1

CRDTs are the future

I saw Martin Kleppmann’s talk a few weeks ago about his approach to realtime editing with CRDTs, and I felt a deep sense of despair. Maybe all the work I’ve been doing for the past decade won’t be part of the future after all, because Martin’s

4

Jepsen: PostgreSQL 12.3

PostgreSQL is a major open-source relational database with a 23-year history and a broad range of features. While Jepsen’s work has traditionally focused on distributed systems, our tooling is readily applicable to traditional, single-node databases. In this report, we present the results of applying Jepsen’s…

16

SQLite Is Serverless

Most SQL database engines are implemented as a separate server process. Programs that want to access the database communicate with the server using some kind of interprocess communication (typically TCP/IP) to send requests to the server and to receive back results. SQLite does not work this way. With SQLite, the…

27

A humble guide to database schema design

Having a good database schema design is crucial for building applications that will need to scale in traffic and complexity. If you happen to do a bad design choice you will see that it takes a lot of effort to stop the pattern from propagating to your backends’ services and controllers, and finally to your frontend.