Monotone Functions and Cache Lines
If you've taken a calculus class your professor might have explained to you the idea of a monotone function, or (in one direction) a nondecreasing function....
Search Engine Retrieval
I want to talk about the high level concept of what a search engine does. And I don’t mean like, Google, or Kagi, “the product,” but the technical object...
Nonograms
Hello! I hope you are having a lovely day. This week I got distracted by some non-database content and it consequently took up a lot of my time. Usually I...
Edge Contractions and Join Planning
The join graph of a query has a vertex for each relation and an edge between any two relations that have a predicate between them. For example, this query:...
Building One to Throw Away
I've been thinking lately about the nature of bespoke data structures for bespoke purposes. I think you learn fairly early on in most programming contexts...
Kicking the Tires on CedarDB's SQL
Last week it was my birthday and I had a bunch of stuff going on over the weekend so a short and simple post this week! If you are a database sicko (and I...
Multiplexing
In the world of electronics, multiplexing is the process of taking a set of communication channels and collapsing them all to be transmitted along a single...
How To Understand That Jepsen Report
There is a new Jepsen report which, as always, is an entertaining read and gives some insight into the way things might be broken in subtle ways. I learned...
Automating the Blue Prince Parlor Puzzle
This is a continuation of last week's post. Please read that one first! In that post, we built an engine that could take puzzles of the following form: blue:...
Propositional Parlor Puzzle
I've recently been playing Blue Prince, which is a great time if you are a fan of puzzle games like Return of the Obra Dinn or Outer Wilds and also a fan of...
Parsing is Search
Something I didn't appreciate for a while (despite the term backtracking being prevalent in both cases) was the extent to which parsing is a search problem....
Feedback Ch 5 6
I am tired. I have been travelling and sick and oncall for the past couple weeks. I hope you're all having a good time. I have been thinking lately about the...
Key(anti)chains
This week I was supposed to write about chapters 5 and 6 of the feedback control book but I had a busy week and so wanted to talk about something a bit more...
It's Time to Stop Building KV Databases
I'm so sick of Key-Value. The most unopinionated, uninspired data model that is a pain to use for anything. They're very popular! Among database vendors. Or,...
Chapter 3 & 4 of Feedback Control
We are reading Feedback Control for Computer Systems: Introducing Control Theory to Enterprise Programmers by Philipp K. Janert. For discussion, please see...
Philosophy and Methodology of Experiments
Sometimes you have to do an experiment. This is rote, manual work that is chiefly concerned with data collection. I'm mostly talking about performance...
Chapters 1 & 2 of Feedback Control
Hello! I hope you all had a good weekend. This is the first "study group" issue where I will share thoughts on the first two chapters of Feedback Control for...
More Blind Writes and Merge Operators
Programming Note There is one week left to email me (firstname . lastname at gmail.com, or reply to this email) your thoughts on the first two chapters of...
What if SQL Was Informed by LSMs?
Programming Note: Feedback Control Study Group I'm hosting what I am calling a "study group" about feedback control, loosely backed by Feedback Control for...
Why Feedback Control Interests Me+Discussion Group
I got enough positive interest in some variety of book club that I would like to move forward with that. I want to discuss Feedback Control for Computer...
