Fine! I'll Play With Skiplists

At Re:Invent last week, AWS announced DSQL, their new serverless SQL database. As a fan of distributed SQL databases I have been enjoying reading about the various architectural decisions in Marc Brooker’s blog. One thing I thought was fun to see was the first real retread of the Spanner atomic clocks trick since…Spanner? So I thought this would...

It is the job of modern programming languages to be amenable to abstractions. It should be easy for users to take a little bundle of functionality and reuse it, or build something more complex on top of it, or give it to someone else to use. A good programming language gives you a set of primitives and tools to combine them into more complex...

It is the job of modern programming languages to be amenable to abstractions. It should be easy for users to take a little bundle of functionality and reuse it, or build something more complex on top of it, or give it to someone else to use. A good programming language gives you a set of primitives and tools to combine them into more complex...

Meta note: follow me on Bluesky if you are so inclined. I've been going through some historical stuff lately. Been on a history kick. We went to see the Robert Caro Power Broker exhibit at The New York Historical and it really got me in a mood to be digging through some old musty documents. The paper SEQUEL: A STRUCTURED ENGLISH QUERY LANGUAGE by...

Everything you need to know about query planning can be understood from this query: SELECT * FROM xy WHERE y = 3 ORDER BY x Imagine we have two indexes, one ordered on y, and one ordered on x. Then two possible plans suggest themselves: Plan 1: scan the y index, restricting it to the values of y such that y = 3, then sort the result by x. Plan 2:...