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Supabase Compute: run your agents inside your project
Supabase launches Compute in private alpha (us-west-2): long-running services such as AI agents, background job processors, APIs in any language, data syncs and WebSocket servers that run inside a Supabase project next to Postgres, deployed with the Supabase CLI from Node, Deno or any Dockerfile in 2 GB or 4 GB sizes.
2 min · 491 words
Thomas Neumann argues that Goodhart's law is breaking database benchmarks such as ClickBench, where systems increasingly optimise for the known queries, and proposes keeping benchmark queries secret or generating fresh workloads each round, as SQLStorm does, so results stay meaningful.
3 min · 753 words
We should be more ambitious with the software we build
Dan Luu argues that AI coding tools let skilled engineers attempt far more ambitious software, using Michael Malis's pgrust (a Postgres rewrite with JIT-style optimizations whose testing has surfaced real Postgres bugs) as the running example, and explains why programming expertise still matters for judging model output.
27 min · 6,109 words
Memory is slow, Disk is fast - Part 3
Jared Hulbert benchmarks an on-disk sorted-set structure (DiskArray on 8 NVMe drives, 264 MiB RAM) against an in-RAM AVL tree at 2 billion keys and finds the disk-based design faster at search, rank, insert and delete, arguing Big O misleads and that memory must be treated like a parallel, pipelined block device.
19 min · 4,345 words
Xiangpeng Hao introduces bbtree, a zero-dependency Rust B-tree that he reports is 5x faster than std's BTreeMap on one thread and 12x faster than crossbeam-skiplist at 96 threads, explains how it cuts cache misses and coherence traffic, and describes how the LLM-written code is kept correct with human review, formal verification, deterministic simulation and fuzzing.
19 min · 4,484 words
Twelve years of distributed SQLite
rqlite creator Philip O'Toole recounts the history of distributed SQLite from rqlite's 2014 launch (Raft + SQLite) through dqlite, Litestream, LiteFS, cr-sqlite, libSQL/Turso, SQLite Cloud and Cloudflare D1, arguing the design space has three corners (consensus, streaming, merge) and that the money went to the platforms.
5 min · 1,129 words
Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes
Marc Brooker shows how LLM-built animations backed by real test traces help build intuition for distributed-systems failures, including how a Raft cluster can lose writes when one node's storage lies, and metastable failure.
2 min · 509 words
Murat Demirbas's notes from day 1 of HPTS 2026 at Asilomar, including Ion Stoica's keynote 'Reality is the Final Verifier' on gaps in agentic software engineering, plus talks on storage, metastable failures and Little's Law, CXL memory, LLM training resilience on TPUs and inference.
13 min · 2,948 words
Postgres recovery_prefetch Considered Harmful and Causing Outages
Jeremy Schneider describes a field investigation showing that Postgres's recovery_prefetch setting can quietly cause standby replay lag and production outages, tracing it back to a concern raised on the hackers list years ago and explaining what he found.
5 min · 1,253 words
Announcing DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS “Cinnamon Teal”
The DuckDB team announces DuckDB 2.0.0 LTS, its biggest feature release so far: a polished Quack protocol for DuckDB as a server, asynchronous I/O, a first-class VARIANT type, agent mode, triggers, an extensible PEG-based SQL parser, plus breaking changes and migration notes.
12 min · 2,753 words
Kyle Kingsbury's Jepsen analysis of the Orkes Conductor workflow orchestrator (versions 5.3.2 to 5.5.0-rc2) found frequent concurrent execution of individual tasks, a delayed-execution issue, four minor startWorkflow errors, and three serious bugs that abandoned, forgot or falsely completed workflow executions. Orkes 5.5.6 patches all serious safety issues. Funded by Orkes.
22 min · 5,043 words
Aaron Allen's 'Hanami, Why?' series covers Hanami's database layer: why it splits persistence into relations, repos and structs instead of Rails-style models, the advantages of the repo pattern, keeping persistence from leaking into the rest of an app, and the rough edges he has found so far.
11 min · 2,581 words
UUIDv7 doesn't have the properties you think it does
Robert Alexander argues that RFC-compliant UUIDv7 implementations don't strictly guarantee monotonic ordering, meaningful timestamps, or unguessability, and that only uniqueness is reliable, with questions to ask before picking a generator.
7 min · 1,558 words
Security Update – October 2026: Unauthorized Access to PingCAP Cloud Resources
PingCAP reports that between 9 September and 7 October 2026 an unauthorized party used stolen service account credentials to access internal systems, copy data, and obtain source code; the company describes containment, customer impact, and hardening steps.
3 min · 599 words
Postgres DELETE Can Actually Scale
DBOS explains how Postgres actually deletes rows and how it made workflow retention deletes scale: batched deletes of the oldest workflows, dropping foreign keys so tables are cleaned in phases, debugging a 20-minute index lookup, and why it chose DELETE over dropping partitions.
7 min · 1,532 words
What changes when your search index lives on S3?
Infino explains how putting a full-text search index on object storage changes the cost and latency model: every random read is a billed GET taking tens of milliseconds, and how superfiles, manifests and careful layout keep agent queries fast without packing the working set on local disks.
9 min · 2,019 words
Everyone is doing Git on S3 wrong
Enroute explains why Git is hard to put on object storage, where write-ahead-log designs fall short, and how its Rust, Raft and S3-backed Git server, built on modern database principles, reaches 7,600+ concurrent pushes per second on a single repository, with benchmarks and an open-source 0.3.0 release.
17 min · 3,860 words
Building a Linearizable Log on READ COMMITTED Isolation
Materialize describes how a metastable incident under PostgreSQL SERIALIZABLE led them to build a linearizable metadata log on READ COMMITTED isolation, achieving 3x write throughput, backed by a Lean 4 proof.
20 min · 4,657 words
Announcing pg_vectorsearch: Scalable Open-Source Vector Search in PostgreSQL
Tiger Data launches pg_vectorsearch, an open-source PostgreSQL extension whose PRISM index uses partitioning and compression instead of HNSW graphs to deliver faster vector queries with far less memory and quicker index builds.
11 min · 2,613 words
Radim Marek explains how PostgreSQL's TABLESAMPLE really samples: SYSTEM picks whole pages so rows come in bundles, BERNOULLI with REPEATABLE drifts after an UPDATE, and hashing a key gives a stable sample, plus when each approach fits.
12 min · 2,718 words