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xaprb.com
Personal blog · xaprb.com/blogprogrammingdata
xaprb.com is a personal blog at xaprb.com about programming and data. Since 2008, 77 different Hacker News readers have linked it 101 times, most often “Immutability, MVCC, and garbage collection”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Baron Schwartz's blog on databases: time-series database requirements, MVCC and immutability, and MySQL failover. Commenters cite it as background and link his flight-is-impossible analogy.
- Recommended for · 4 comments
- Called a good summary, quite a read, and a seminal post; one commenter said the hiring approach in one post would make a company more attractive.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Immutability, MVCC, and garbage collection6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-12-28
- Flight Is Impossible5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-08-21
- What is it like to write a technical book?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-06-15
- The manager-programmer face-off over NoSQL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-05-11
- Defining Moments in Database History2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-20
- If Eventual Consistency Seems Hard, Wait Till You Try MVCC2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-12-08
- My Twitter Following Strategy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-08
- Time-Series Database Requirements2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-08
- /blog/2013/10/01/mysql-isnt-limited-to-nested-loop-joins/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-10-02
- Product Market Fit2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-01-06
What Hacker News says?
I have no comment on the QC claims, but regarding the flight analogy, it seems you're being disingenuous: https://www.xaprb.com/blog/flight-is-impossible/
Comment linking /blog/flight-is-impossible/
on “Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ”Submitted Computer Science students: Learn to write as a story · 140 points
HN discussion> We'll never be a spacefaring species, the universe is way too big (we can't even explore our solar system in any meaningful way) and energy requirements for faster travel are simply too high. I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible. — Lord Kelvin, 1895 https://www.xaprb.com/blog/flight-is-impossible/
Comment linking /blog/flight-is-impossible/
on “NASA Has Decided to Start Building the Lunar Gateway Using the Falcon Heavy”Submitted Immutability, MVCC, and garbage collection as a story · 135 points
HN discussionyour findings are supported by Baron Schwartz as well ( https://www.xaprb.com/blog/2012/09/17/is-automated-failover-... and others)
Comment linking /blog/2012/09/17/is-automated-failover-the-root-of-all-evil/
on “PostgreSQL HA cluster failure: a post-mortem”Submitted If Eventual Consistency Seems Hard, Wait Till You Try MVCC as a story · 121 points
HN discussionIt might help to think about time-series databases from the requirements they're addressing. "Time-Series Database Requirements" [0] is a good summary of the problem space. [0] https://www.xaprb.com/blog/2014/06/08/time-series-database-r...
Comment linking /blog/2014/06/08/time-series-database-requirements/
on “TimescaleDB vs ClickHouse”Submitted Time-Series Database Requirements as a story · 94 points
HN discussionMVCC is not versioning. MVCC is concurrency control. I would have to be convinced that the DB is an appropriate place to handle versioning of the kind you are speaking of. For instance, see this article: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-g... Upshot is that RethinkDB started out append-only with rewindability etc. and then ran into real-world problems. Every system I've ever seen that did ve…
Comment linking /blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-garbage-collection/
on “RethinkDB 1.16: cluster management API, realtime push”Submitted How to find per-process I/O statistics on Linux as a story · 49 points
HN discussionImmutability is hardly a cure-all, see the discussion here for why RethinkDB moved away from it: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-g... The reality is shared, mutable state is the most efficient way of working with memory-sized data. People can rant and rave all they want about the benefits of immutability vs mutability, but at the end of the day, if performance is important to you, you'd be…
Comment linking /blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-garbage-collection/
on “Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza”Submitted Immutability, MVCC, and garbage collection (2013) as a story · 48 points
HN discussionRelated: Baron Schwartz article on Time-series Database Requirements is quite a read: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2014/06/08/time-series-database-re... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9166495
Comment linking /blog/2014/06/08/time-series-database-requirements/
on “Thoughts on Time-series Databases”Submitted Dr. Richard Hipp calls them "Postmodern Databases" as a story · 47 points
HN discussion> Why was -- in this contrived scenario -- Jack's solution a "maintenance nightmare"? Just because. Maybe this article will shed some light: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2010/05/10/the-manager-programmer-...
Comment linking /blog/2010/05/10/the-manager-programmer-face-off-over-nosql/
on “The Number One Trait of a Great Developer”Submitted How to find un-indexed queries in MySQL, using tcpdump as a story · 38 points
HN discussionI'd like to welcome the github ops/dbas to the club of people who've learned the hard way that automated database failover usually causes more downtime than it prevents. Here's sortof the seminal post on the matter in the mysql community: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2009/08/30/failure-scenarios-and-s... Though it turns into an MMM pile-on the tool doesn't matter so much as the scenarios. Automated failover is simply u…
Comment linking /blog/2009/08/30/failure-scenarios-and-solutions-in-master-master-replication/
on “GitHub availability this week”Submitted What is it like to write a technical book? as a story · 34 points
HN discussionAlthough I wouldn’t work for a company which blindly made hiring decisions based on a profile, the approach in this blog post would make the company more attractive: https://www.xaprb.com/blog/personality-assessments-hiring/ Excerpts: > The assessments are never really correct, so a vital step is reviewing the report with the candidate … > How the candidate reacts to the report; which things they think are true or f…
Comment linking /blog/personality-assessments-hiring/
on “Lessons from Interviewing 400 Engineers Over Three Startups”Submitted Three Vacation Policies as a story · 31 points
HN discussionMySQL sort-merge joins, it's right in that documentation, but it calls everything out as optimizations on nested-loop. http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/10/01/mysql-isnt-limited-to-n... It doesn't do hash joins which is the biggest limitation but MySQL is pretty good a joins and certainly was never bad enough to warrant it's reputation. It's toolbox is smaller than other RDBMS products but it's not empty.
Comment linking /blog/2013/10/01/mysql-isnt-limited-to-nested-loop-joins/
on “A Simple Guide to Five Normal Forms in Relational Database Theory (1982)”Submitted Why Deployment Freezes Don't Prevent Outages as a story · 30 points
HN discussionThe author also has thoughts on Datomic: http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-g... tl;dr; append-only is great as long as you don't use your database much.
Comment linking /blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-garbage-collection/
on “If Eventual Consistency Seems Hard, Wait Till You Try MVCC”Submitted A review of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance by Gregory Smith as a story · 17 points
HN discussion> It is difficult to imagine anything resembling a "general" intelligence that isn't attached to a life-form[...] How is that argument any stronger than these ones that (non-animal) heavier than air flight is impossible? https://www.xaprb.com/blog/flight-is-impossible/ I think these are actually stronger arguments, because I can think of at least three very least significant material-science advantages that birds ha…
Comment linking /blog/flight-is-impossible/
on “There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence (2017)”Submitted MySQL command-line tip: compare result sets as a story · 11 points
HN discussionTokuMX. They ripped out the native MongoDB storage engine and replaced it with the TokuDB engine. http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/04/29/what-tokudb-might-mean-...
Comment linking /blog/2013/04/29/what-tokudb-might-mean-for-mongodb/
on “Cassandra vs MongoDB For Time Series Data”Submitted What is it like to write a technical book? as a story · 8 points
HN discussion- xd · 2013-10-02
http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/10/01/mysql-isnt-limited-to-n...
Comment linking /blog/2013/10/01/mysql-isnt-limited-to-nested-loop-joins/
on “MySQL is to SQL like MongoDB to NoSQL” Submitted Why is MySQL more popular than PostgreSQL? as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
