Wallaby is a Postgres CDC (Change Data Capture) engine for .NET that enables real-time data synchronization from EF Core entities, Marten documents, or plain tables to external destinations like search indexes or vector databases with minimal setup and compile-time safety checks.
This article explains how full-text search engines work by using inverted indexes—data structures that map individual words to the documents containing them. Unlike traditional b-tree indexes that work on exact values, inverted indexes enable fast searching for words anywhere in text by maintaining a term dictionary and postings lists that store document locations.
Article explaining the lost-update concurrency problem where two simultaneous database writes can erase each other, and three approaches to fix it: conditional updates with WHERE clauses, pessimistic locking with SELECT FOR UPDATE, and optimistic locking with version checks.
Postgres SELECT DISTINCT performs poorly on large datasets because it scans every matching row regardless of indexing, rather than efficiently retrieving unique values. The authors discovered this issue in a partitioned queue workload where the query scaled with total enqueued workflows instead of the number of active partitions, taking seconds instead of milliseconds.
Dimitri Fontaine examines ten years of Postgres logical replication evolution from version 10 through 19, demonstrating how the feature has eliminated the need for external tools like Londiste and PgQ. The article begins a series exploring architectural patterns—hub-and-worker systems, consolidation, and zero-downtime upgrades—that are now possible with core Postgres functionality, using a metering system example to illustrate row filtering and column-level replication introduced in Postgres 15.
Kafgres, a Postgres extension embedding a Kafka broker, achieved 700 MB/s write throughput and 600k events/sec on an i9 server. Through profiling and optimization—including query plan caching and relaxed commit strategies—the developers eliminated CPU bottlenecks that had previously limited performance to 100-200 MB/s.
This article explores ten years of Postgres logical replication evolution since its introduction in Postgres 10. The author describes building a hub-and-workers architecture for distributed write loads using logical replication instead of older tools like Londiste, and outlines a series covering three key architectures and how successive Postgres releases have simplified the required SQL.
This article explains how inverted indexes power full-text search in databases like Postgres. Unlike b-trees that work on entire column values, inverted indexes map individual words to document locations, enabling efficient searches for terms anywhere in text fields. The index consists of a term dictionary and postings lists that store compressed document identifiers.
Open source software dominates modern computing because engineers who use it can fix problems themselves rather than relying on vendors, creating faster innovation driven by intrinsic motivation. The article argues that code's value comes from developer commitment and responsibility, not the code itself, making open source superior to closed source even as AI improves. Companies monetize open source by providing support and guarantees to enterprise users.
Fly.io announced 2026 pricing updates across its services. Machines RAM pricing increases to $6.00 per GB per month, while Sprites compute becomes more affordable with metered hourly billing and significantly lower costs. Managed Postgres and storage pricing remain largely unchanged with prorated billing for mid-month cluster changes.
Runtime Arguments episode 37 explores the Unix Year 2038 problem—when 32-bit signed timestamps overflow on January 19, 2038—and compares it to Y2K, arguing both represented reasonable engineering trade-offs for their era given storage constraints. The hosts discuss how 64-bit systems and modern kernels (Linux 5.6+) have largely mitigated the issue, then catalog real-world overflow bugs spanning GPS week counters, NTP rollover, Boeing 787 generators, NASA probes, and date-handling flaws in Excel, PlayStation 3, and Microsoft Zune.