Subject
18 entries
Databases
Bookmarks
SimTigerBeetle: TigerBeetle in WebAssembly
SimTigerBeetle runs TigerBeetle — the high-performance financial accounting database — compiled to WebAssembly in the browser. An interactive simulator for understanding TigerBeetle's consistency model and transaction semantics without local setup.
Dequery: The SQL Debugger
Dequery is a SQL debugger that traces data lineage step-by-step through CTEs, subqueries, JOINs, and window functions — showing which source rows contributed to each result. Fills the long-standing gap between SQL query execution and traditional debugging.
Hasura GraphQL Streaming Subscriptions
Hasura's architecture doc for streaming subscriptions — a way to stream ordered data from a database cursor in real time over GraphQL. Solves the problem of efficiently delivering large, incrementally-changing result sets without polling.
py-caskdb: Educational Disk-Based Key-Value Store
py-caskdb is an educational Python implementation of the Bitcask storage model — a log-structured, append-only disk-based key-value store. A hands-on way to understand how real KV stores like Riak's Bitcask backend achieve fast writes with crash safety.
How I Put My Whole Life into a Single Database
Felix Krause's account of tracking his entire life in a single structured database — health metrics, mood, social interactions, finances, productivity — for years. A committed quantified-self practice that raises honest questions about what actually changes when you measure everything.
Querying Live Crypto Trades with SQL in Real-Time
QuestDB tutorial showing how to query live cryptocurrency trade data in real-time with SQL — ingesting from Coinbase's WebSocket feed into QuestDB and running time-series queries. A practical demo of time-series SQL for financial market data.
OrioleDB: Modern Cloud-Native PostgreSQL Storage Engine
OrioleDB is a PostgreSQL table access method (storage engine) built to solve PostgreSQL's wicked scalability problems — bloat, vacuum overhead, lock contention — by using a copy-on-write B-tree and row-level WAL. Aims to make PostgreSQL cloud-native without forking it.
MySQL INSERT Speed Optimization
MySQL 5.0 reference manual section on optimizing INSERT performance — covering bulk inserts, transaction batching, and buffer sizing. The reference for squeezing write throughput out of MySQL when ingestion speed matters.
PoWA — PostgreSQL Workload Analyzer
PoWA (PostgreSQL Workload Analyzer) is a real-time statistics and workload analysis tool for PostgreSQL — collects query statistics, visualizes slow queries, and helps identify index and configuration improvements. A targeted alternative to generic APM tools for Postgres-specific performance work.
HyperLogLog in Pure SQL
Periscope Data's post implementing HyperLogLog in pure SQL — a probabilistic cardinality estimator that counts distinct values using a fixed amount of memory regardless of dataset size. Clever engineering that demonstrates how probabilistic algorithms can be embedded in SQL-only environments.
Scaling SQL with Redis
David Cramer's post on using Redis to scale SQL databases — covering caching patterns, read replica offloading, and where Redis fits in a stack that can't abandon SQL entirely. Practical patterns from the Disqus/Sentry engineering blog at production scale.
BayesDB
BayesDB from MIT CSAIL's probabilistic computing group — a database system that lets you query statistical relationships using a SQL-like language (BQL) without specifying a model. Automatically infers the right probabilistic model from data.
A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins
Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror post using Venn diagrams to explain SQL JOIN types visually. One of the most-referenced SQL explanations on the web — the mental model that finally makes INNER, LEFT, RIGHT, and FULL OUTER joins click.
Google Spanner: Globally Distributed Transactions (OSDI 2012)
Google's Spanner paper from OSDI 2012 — the design of Google's globally distributed SQL database with externally consistent transactions. TrueTime, the GPS/atomic-clock-based approach to distributed timestamps, is the paper's most memorable technical contribution.
SQL vs. NoSQL
Linux Journal's SQL vs. NoSQL comparison from the height of the NoSQL hype cycle — a useful grounding piece that distinguished the different NoSQL categories (document, key-value, column-family, graph) and when each made sense. The pendulum has since swung back toward SQL for most use cases.
HBase vs Cassandra: Why We Moved
A firsthand account of migrating from HBase to Cassandra, written in 2010 but widely read through 2012. The core finding: Cassandra was operationally simpler and more resilient to node failures, while HBase required careful HDFS management and had more complex failure modes.
HyperDex: NoSQL Database Based in Hyperspace
The HyperDex academic paper introducing a NoSQL key-value store that used hyperspace hashing to support efficient secondary attribute searches — the main weakness of most key-value stores at the time. An elegant theoretical approach that didn't achieve mainstream adoption.
Getting Started with HyperDex
A practitioner's getting-started guide to HyperDex — the NoSQL database based on hyperspace hashing — showing how to install, configure, and run basic operations. Pairs with the academic paper as the hands-on entry point.