Writing

Essays and notes on Postgres, databases, systems, and the occasional graphics experiment.

Essays

Why Every PeerDB Cloud Tenant Still Gets a Private Postgres

Why PeerDB Cloud gives every tenant its own logical Postgres database for its catalog, and why the “boring” choice lets us move faster.

Shader Playground

Recreating the sunset from Turner's The Fighting Temeraire with fragment shaders, one gradient at a time.

Fitness and Freshness

A look at the fitness and freshness metrics of Strava.

Speeding up rendering by racing the scanline.

Proving Order Axioms for Dedekind Cuts

Constructing the reals with Dedekind cuts, and proving the transitivity order axiom that Zorich's Mathematical Analysis I leaves as an exercise.

Navier-Stokes equation for dummies

A gentle walk through what the Navier-Stokes equation says about how fluids move, from a conversation at an airport gate.

Cutting Buildings

Geospatial analysis for division of buildings WKTs.

Finding duplicate places in your data

Using a generative core/background language model, after Facebook's Deduplicating a Places Database paper, to find duplicate points of interest.

Structures in jemalloc

Deeper look at the structures in jemalloc memory allocator.

Datastructures for Analytics

HyperLogLog for cardinality and Count-Min Sketch for frequency: two probabilistic data structures that make large-scale analytics cheap.

Cryptography Engineering: Introduction to Cryptography

Reading notes on chapter one of Cryptography Engineering: encryption, Kerckhoffs' principle, authentication, and public-key encryption.

Elsewhere

What is direct I/O, and why does ClickHouse Managed Postgres use it for backups?

Postgres on NVMe: performance and the convergence of transactions and analytics

What else runs on your Postgres server, and how do we stop it from taking the database down?

Postgres FDW: Pushdown is a negotiation

ClickHouse, with David Wheeler, Philip Dubé

Why strict memory overcommit matters for Postgres

What is WAL backpressure, and why does ClickHouse Managed Postgres need it?

How we configure huge pages in ClickHouse Managed Postgres

How we scale PgBouncer in ClickHouse Managed Postgres

What's new in Postgres Managed by ClickHouse: RBAC, Terraform, ClickPipes, extensions, and more

Fast, scalable, enterprise-grade Postgres natively integrated with ClickHouse

ClickHouse, with Sai Srirampur

pg_stat_ch: a PostgreSQL extension that exports every metric to ClickHouse

Under the Hood: Building MySQL Change Data Capture in ClickPipes

ClickHouse, with Philip Dubé

How ClickHouse Cloud uses AWS Graviton to boost performance and efficiency

ClickHouse, with Francesco Ciocchetti

PeerDB Cloud is Now in Public Beta!

PeerDB Launch Week 1 - 2024

Moving a Billion Postgres Rows on a $100 Budget

PeerDB UI - Deeper Dive: Part 1

Five Useful Queries to Get BigQuery Costs

Celebrating New Year with Postgres and Snowflake

PG Slot Notify: Monitor Postgres Slot Growth in Slack

Building a Streaming Platform in Go for Postgres

Using Temporal to Scale Data Synchronization at PeerDB