Recent Articles
Cloudflare’s Fourth Act Is Ads and Payments
pg_savior: a seatbelt for Postgres
The last line of defense for those OOPS moments — so even DBAs can sleep peacefully.
Have you ever accidentally run a DELETE without a WHERE clause? Or typed DROP TABLE thinking you were in staging, only to realize a half-second too late that you were in prod?
If yes — keep reading, this is for you. If no — keep reading anyway. Nobody who uses Postgres long enough stays immune.
I Asked My Local LLM to Add 23 Numbers. I Got Seven Different Wrong Answers.
Seven attempts, seven different wrong answers — lessons from setting up a local LLM.
It’s tax season, which means I’ve been staring at a notes file full of stock sales — 23 transactions across the year that I needed to total up. The kind of data I’d rather not paste into a chat window I don’t control.
I’d been meaning to set up a local LLM anyway, and this seemed like the perfect low-stakes test. M3 Max, 64GB of unified memory, plenty of headroom for a real model. I installed Ollama, pulled Qwen 2.5 Coder, pasted the list, asked the question.
Postgres Is the Gateway Drug
The analytics databases optimized for queries. The real leverage was always where data gets written.
Your application writes to Postgres. So does almost everyone else’s. Postgres is the most widely used database in the world, topping Stack Overflow’s developer survey two years running. It didn’t win as a data warehouse. It won as the place applications write.
For years, the data infrastructure companies competed on what happens after — faster queries, better compression, smarter optimizers. The traditional model relied on storage gravity: move your data into our walls, pay us to store and query it. Once data lived inside a warehouse, the switching cost kept it there.
RDS' margin is EC2's opportunity
I was writing an article for Infoq on the topic less spoken costs of managed databases and one question that the editor asked is how much margin RDS makes compared to running a Postgres instance on EC2? That intrigued me and honestly, I never did the math so far. I have been using AWS-managed databases since 2016 and I thought what’s a better time to do an analysis of Cloud cost than today ?!