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Exploring Databases Visually
Things you can do with a terminal emulator that renders images: generate contextual entity-relationship diagrams and navigate your data model from the inside!
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The Database Inside Your Codebase
Navigating codebases of any meaningful size is difficult. Most of a programmer's time is spent jumping through the codebase, reading or skimming to build a ment...
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A Data Pipeline Is a Materialized View
Say you run an online book store and want to build a data pipeline that figures out who the top-selling authors are. Logically, the input to the pipeline is a log of every individual book purchase on the store for all time, along with details about each book like who authored it. And the output is a list of the…
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Git as a NoSql Database (2016)
Git’s man-pages state that it’s a stupid content tracker. It’s probably the most used version control system in the world. Which is very strange, since it doesn’t describe itself as being a source control system. And in fact, you can use git to track any
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FastText is the best text classification library for a quick baseline
Text classification is a very frequent use case for machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). It’s used for things like spam detection in emails, sentiment analysis for social media posts, or intent detection in chat bots. In this series I am going to compare several libraries that can be used to…
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Why are there so many Canadians in India?
Any time India comes up in the context of Firefox and Data I know it’s going to be an interesting day. They’re our largest Beta population: They’re our second-largest English user…
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Write an SQL query builder in 150 lines of Python
This is the fourth article in a series about writing my own SQL query builder. Today, we'll rewrite it from scratch, explore API design, learn when to be lazy, and look at worse and better ways of doing things – all in 150 lines of Python!
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Lessons Learned from Two Years as a Data Scientist
I finally escaped from (grad) school in 2019, spent two months interning as an assistant trader at FTX, and have since spent the last two years working as a data scientist, with the bulk of that time at Microsoft and the last two months at Anthropic. Not gonna lie — my time as a data scientist has been pretty awesome…
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Anonymized data is rarely anonymous
Justin Sherman for Wired points out the farce that is anonymized data: Data on hundreds of millions of Americans’ races, genders, ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations, political beliefs, int…
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One of these JPEGs is not like the other
“JPEG” or the image encoding specification by the “Joint Photographic Experts Group” (JPEG) is a truly universal format at this stage. You really cannot go very far on the internet without seeing a JPEG file. The amount of content encoded in JPEGs must be surely biblical by now. If there is one thing that is going to…
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Debugging random slow writes in PostgreSQL
Understanding & mitigating randomly slow writes in PostgreSQL
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SQLite Is Dynamically Typed (2020)
A small, cool fact about SQLite is that its columns are flexibly typed. You can store any value in any column! Try it out: sqlite> create table t1 (v1 int, v2 varchar(10)); sqlite> insert into t1 values ("abc", "this string is longer than 10 characters!"); sqlite> select * from t1; abc|this string is longer than 10…
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Back to basics: Writing an application using Go and PostgreSQL
Learn how to use PostgreSQL with the Go programming language using the pgx driver and toolkit in a very productive manner. Furthermore, with the provided source code, you'll be able to learn how to write efficient and sound unit and integration tests, ready to be run locally or on a Continuous Integration environment…
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Scaling Relational SQL Databases (2020)
A list of things that we can do when we need to scale a SQL database.
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Why start a new database conference?
Somehow I am organizing a conference called Have you tried rubbing a database on it?
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Filecoin, StorJ and the problem with decentralized storage (2019)
Blockchains for everything Decentralized storage services such as Filecoin and StorJ seek to disrupt the data-storage industry, using blockchain tokens to create a competitive marketplace that can …
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Diving Deep on S3 Consistency
A deep dive on why we changed Amazon S3's consistency model
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Joining CSV and JSON data with an in-memory SQLite database
The new sqlite-utils memory command can import CSV and JSON data directly into an in-memory SQLite database, combine and query it using SQL and output the results as CSV, JSON …
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What’s the origin of the phrase “big data doesn’t fit in excel”?
Welcome to Yak Shaving School! As part of my MSc I'm reading a book about Data Analytics. So I've been chasing down quotes to find their origin. One paper had this popular quote in it (emphasis added): As with many rapidly emerging concepts, Big Data has been variously defined and operationalized, ranging from trite…
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PostgreSQL 15: default permissions for everyone is now restricted to db owner
PostgreSQL always allowed, by default, any user to connect to any database, and create new tables (and views, and so on) in “public" schema. The one that is created by default.
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Make Patterns Pop Out of Heatmaps with Seriation (2018)
One of the easiest ways to start visualizing data is to turn a table into a heatmap: every cell gets a colour, the higher the number the brighter the colour. Unfortunately, this is often a fairly unrewarding exercise, yielding graphics that look like plaid or tartan fabric. Part of the problem is that the rows and…
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Analyzing and breaking an externally encrypted HDD
Analyzing and breaking external encrypted HDD has been a “hobby” of mine for quite some time. With my colleagues Joffrey Czarny and Julien Lenoir we looked at several models in the past :
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R, OpenMP, MKL, Disaster
The answer should be something close to ALPHA , i.e. 0.01 . What R was printing out was weird numbers like 1e-10 .
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Why query planning for streaming systems is hard
Many groups are working on running sql queries in incremental/streaming systems . Query planning in this context is not a well understood problem. This post is a quick pointer towards the many open problems. It's not intended to be complete or authoritative, because I haven't engaged with the problem much beyond…
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