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Why didn't anybody tell me about hash slots
A delivery-matching engineer discovers Redis Cluster hash slots the hard way, and walks through how slot-aware keys change caching, sharding, and multi-key operations in production.
8 min · 1,937 words
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, IO) in PostgreSQL 19
Franck Pachot walks through PostgreSQL 19's new EXPLAIN IO stats—prefetch depth, request size, concurrency, and waits—using Little's Law to interpret async read streams.
4 min · 1,031 words
PgDog’s Lev Kokotov on why engineers fix open problems they care about, why ownership beats closed-source support tickets, and how free-as-in-freedom Postgres sharding funds itself with enterprise SLAs.
2 min · 387 words
Apache Cassandra® 6 Accord transactions: What you need to know
There have always been architectural trade-offs when considering a distributed database like Apache Cassandra versus a relational database. Cassandra excels at linear horizontal scalability, multi-region replication, and fault-tolerant uptime that relational systems couldn’t match.
7 min · 1,612 words
Alex Alejandre interviews CHICKEN Scheme maintainer Peter Bex on the 6.0.0 release, Scheme standardization, Postgres versus MySQL/SQLite, and working in Clojure.
15 min · 3,518 words
S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
Amazon S3, and its analogues in other clouds, have become the foundation of the modern cloud software architecture. Today, nearly every data-intensive system is being built around S3. However, the hardware assumptions baked into S3’s design – and into all the software architectures that have emerged around it – are rapidly becoming obsolete.
3 min · 742 words
Persistent Databases in the Browser with DuckDB-Wasm and OPFS
DuckDB explains how DuckDB-Wasm can open a persistent database file in the browser’s Origin Private File System (OPFS), when data reaches disk, and how that changes browser analytics apps that previously relied on Parquet-in-IndexedDB workarounds.
8 min · 1,800 words
Introducing TIN: full-text search for Postgres
PlanetScale announces TIN (Text INdex), a GA full-text search extension for Postgres and Neki with boolean/phrase/span queries, fuzzy and regex matching, BM25 ranking, and transaction-correct updates—built to be fast while staying inside Postgres.
15 min · 3,349 words
The query finished… Why is my Fabric SQL database still consuming CUs?
Two minutes of SQL database activity in Microsoft Fabric can mean ~17 minutes of compute billing. Nikola Ilic walks through CU metering with application, development, and troubleshooting examples.
8 min · 1,796 words
Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres
Leis et al. asked this exact question in 2015. Then, they asked it again 10 years later. Despite an enormous body of research spanning a decade since their original exploration, they found that query optimizers continue to leave much to be desired. I was surprised when I first learned about this. A Postgres database should know everything about the stuff that lives in its tables, no? How hard can it be?
41 min · 9,393 words
Appwrite Init 2026 recap: Everything we shipped
Appwrite wraps Init 2026 with a full recap of five days of launches: Appwrite 2.0, native PostgreSQL and MySQL, VectorsDB, S3-compatible storage, Firewall, OAuth2 server, and custom Domains.
7 min · 1,505 words
Better Vector Search for Long Documents: Chunking Inside Manticore Search
An embedding model reads only the first few hundred tokens of a document and silently drops the rest. Manticore Search now splits long documents for you at INSERT time: add chunk_strategy to the vector column and pick one of five strategies. No ingest pipeline, no splitter library. On our own manual, recall@5 for deep content went from 55% to 83%.
31 min · 7,181 words
Same Job, Two Engines: InnoDB and Iceberg Internals
Marc Paul compares running the same stock-analysis workload on MySQL InnoDB (OLTP) and an Iceberg lakehouse (OLAP): what InnoDB optimizes for, and the two mechanisms that make a lakehouse work — read-side pruning and the atomic pointer-swap commit.
14 min · 3,128 words
A Search-and-Inference Database from Scratch in Pure Zig
Antfly recounts rewriting their Go retrieval engine in Zig while still early: first-principles design, caring about the model over embeddings, TigerBeetle-style simulation testing, and what they learned.
12 min · 2,793 words
MotherDuck's Mehdi Ouazza benchmarks the DuckDB 2.0 alpha on a laptop and S3, covering async I/O read-ahead that makes S3 reads 2-3x faster with no query changes, faster recursive CTEs for deep hierarchies, shredded VARIANT columns that beat JSON parsing about sixfold, and smaller wins from the commit log.
10 min · 2,220 words
Introducing chdb Postgres extension: High-performance imports from cloud storage
ClickHouse announces the chdb Postgres extension: fast imports and exports across cloud storage and formats, powered by the embedded ClickHouse engine and usable via COPY-style workflows.
7 min · 1,599 words
Sharding vs. Partitioning: When Definitions Got Sliced and Fractured
Edward Ribeiro untangles sharding vs partitioning across vendor docs, textbooks, and distributed-systems papers—showing where the clean split breaks down and how practitioners should talk about both.
19 min · 4,297 words
POSETTE Talk Recap: Postgres Isn't Slow. Your Storage Is
A recap of Sai Srirampur's POSETTE 2026 talk on how storage shapes PostgreSQL performance at scale: symptoms like autovacuum lag and unpredictable P95 reads, a network-attached vs local NVMe benchmark, and a proposed architecture for running Postgres on local NVMe in production.
7 min · 1,585 words
The Polyglot's Dilemma: Conformance Testing a Dozen Specs in as Many Languages
A. Jesse Jiryu Davis explains how MongoDB keeps a dozen natively written drivers in a dozen languages consistent with shared specs, using language-agnostic YAML conformance tests and a unified test format, with lessons summarized from a paper co-authored with Jeremy Mikola and Jeff Yemin.
9 min · 1,983 words
Learning a few things about running SQLiteOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
Practical lessons from operating SQLite behind a Django website. Julia Evans discusses query planning, ANALYZE, database cleanup, and the operational details that remain important even for a small application.
1 min · 76 wordsagent-written