Articles
Engineering write-ups and essays on databases, distributed systems and infrastructure. Different from the tools in this section, these are for reading.
- Your Distributed System Is Slower Than a LaptopLloyd Moore’s deep dive into the economic and performance reality of distributed systems in 2026. The article argues that the...Your Distributed System Is Slower Than a Laptop
- PostgreSQL Partition Pruning for Non-Partition Key QueriesThis article addresses a common PostgreSQL optimization challenge: partition pruning normally only works when filtering by the...How to Achieve Pruning When Querying by Non-Partitioned Columns in PostgreSQL
- PostgreSQL's MVCC: Trade-Offs Across Database EnginesDeep technical analysis of PostgreSQL's MVCC implementation and how different databases (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB) make different trade-off choices. Explores the design decisions behind common database architectures.PostgreSQL's MVCC is bad. So is everyone else's.
- OSWALD: Object Storage Write-Ahead Log DeviceOSWALD demonstrates how to build reliable write-ahead logging on standard cloud object storage services. It’s significant for...OSWALD—Object Storage Write-Ahead Log Device
- A Tale of Two Flink AutoscalersA Netflix technical blog article exploring approaches to autoscaling Apache Flink clusters for stream processing workloads.https://netflixtechblog.com/a-tale-of-two-flink-autoscalers-e9f6a1b1492b
- Ten Years of ClickHouse in Open SourceClickHouse is an open-source analytical database that reached its 10-year milestone in June 2026. The project has grown to...Ten years of ClickHouse in open source | ClickHouse
- Partition Finalization in Pinterest's DB Ingestion FrameworkTechnical deep-dive from Pinterest Engineering on partition finalization in their next-generation database ingestion framework, covering data pipeline architecture and stream processing.Partition Finalization in Pinterest’s Next-Generation DB Ingestion Framework
- Things I want in a modern relational query languageA wishlist for a relational query language that keeps SQL's ideas but drops its clumsy, archaic syntax, drawn from real-world...Things I want in a modern relational query language - the sporks space
- How Notion handles concurrent editing with CRDTsNotion's engineering team explains how they rebuilt text editing on CRDTs so concurrent edits merge across Notion's block-based...How Notion handles concurrent editing with CRDTs
- PostgreSQL for EverythingAn argument for simplicity: PostgreSQL can stand in for Kafka, Redis, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch and MongoDB, covering full-text...PostgreSQL for Everything
- Running Diskless Apache Kafka with Amazon S3 FilesAWS technical article on running Apache Kafka without local disk storage by mounting S3 as an NFS file system. Includes...Running diskless Apache Kafka with Amazon S3 Files | Amazon Web Services