Hacker News: apavlo

New comment by apavlo in "10-202: Introduction to Modern AI (CMU)"

apavlo — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:02:21 +0000

For those that are unaware, the instructor of this is on the board of OpenAI:

https://openai.com/index/zico-kolter-joins-openais-board-of-...

New comment by apavlo in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

apavlo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:32:52 +0000

> I'd love to hear about semantic layer developments in this space (e.g. Malloy etc.)

We also hosted Llyod to give a talk about Malloy in March 2025:

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/sql-death-malloy-a-modern-open-...

New comment by apavlo in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

apavlo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:37:04 +0000

> How is SpacetimeDB not mentioned here?

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2026/01/2025-databases-re...

New comment by apavlo in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

apavlo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:18:59 +0000

> none of the reviews of the last few years mention immutable and/or bi-temporal databases.

We hosted XTDB to give a tech talk five weeks ago:

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futuredata-reconstructing-histo...

> Which looks more like a blind spot to me honestly.

What do you want me to say about them? Just that they exist?

New comment by apavlo in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

apavlo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:08:34 +0000

> Am I living in a bubble?

There are rumblings that the MySQL project is rudderless after Oracle fired the team working on the open-source project in September 2025. Oracle is putting all its energy in its closed-source MySQL Heatwave product. There is a new company that is looking to take over leadership of open-source MySQL but I can't talk about them yet.

The MariaDB Corporation financial problems have also spooked companies and so more of them are looking to switch to Postgres.

New comment by apavlo in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

apavlo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:02:02 +0000

> Nothing about time series-oriented databases?

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2026/01/2025-databases-re...

New comment by apavlo in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

apavlo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:01:42 +0000

> I can't believe that article has no mention of SQLite ??

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2026/01/2025-databases-re...

New comment by apavlo in "Databases in 2025: A Year in Review"

apavlo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 13:59:52 +0000

Thanks for catching this. Updated: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2026/01/2025-databases-re...

I need to figure out an automatic way to track these.

New comment by apavlo in "MinIO stops distributing free Docker images"

apavlo — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:02:58 +0000

> If the org behind it ever decides to rugpull/elastic you

I love it that you use "elastic" as a verb here.

New comment by apavlo in "F3: Open-source data file format for the future [pdf]"

apavlo — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 03:31:32 +0000

> so... you take 10%-30% performance hit _right away_, and you perpetually give up any opportunities to improve the decoder in the future.

The WASM is meant as a backup. If you have the native decoder installed (e.g., as a crate), then a system will prefer to use that. Otherwise, fallback to WASM. A 10-30% performance hit is worth it over not being able to read a file at all.

New comment by apavlo in "F3: Open-source data file format for the future [pdf]"

apavlo — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 01:51:39 +0000

The backstory is complicated. The plan was to establish a consortium between CMU, Tsinghua, Meta, CWI, VoltronData, Nvidia, and SpiralDB to unify behind a single file format. But that fell through after CMU's lawyers freaked out over Meta's NDA stuff to get access to a preview of Velox Nimble. IANAL, but Meta's NDA seemed reasonable to me. So the plan fell through after about a year, and then everyone released their own format:

→ Meta's Nimble: https://github.com/facebookincubator/nimble

→ CWI's FastLanes: https://github.com/cwida/FastLanes

→ SpiralDB's Vortex: https://vortex.dev

→ CMU + Tsinghua F3: https://github.com/future-file-format/f3

On the research side, we (CMU + Tsinghua) weren't interested in developing new encoders and instead wanted to focus on the WASM embedding part. The original idea came as a suggestion from Hannes@DuckDB to Wes McKinney (a co-author with us). We just used Vortex's implementations since they were in Rust and with some tweaks we could get most of them to compile to WASM. Vortex is orthogonal to the F3 project and has the engineering energy necessary to support it. F3 is an academic prototype right now.

I note that the Germans also released their own fileformat this year that also uses WASM. But they WASM-ify the entire file and not individual column groups:

→ Germans: https://github.com/AnyBlox

New comment by apavlo in "Show HN: Lingo – A linguistic database in Rust with nanosecond-level performance"

apavlo — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 16:38:07 +0000

> • Memory-Mapping (mmap): We treat the database file as if it’s already in memory, eliminating the distinction between disk and RAM.

Ugh, not another one...

New comment by apavlo in "PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA"

apavlo — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 19:59:24 +0000

You are conflating MySQL and InnoDB. The latter does a lot of good things, much more than the former.

New comment by apavlo in "Gartner's grift is about to unravel"

apavlo — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 21:56:18 +0000

They double dip. You pay them to review your company. Other companies pay them to read those reviews.

New comment by apavlo in "Show HN: Starter Repo for Rust CLI with built in database"

apavlo — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 22:32:52 +0000

Dude fix your DBMS implementation before you start losing people's data. Or switch to something vetted like SQLite.

New comment by apavlo in "Future Data Systems Seminar Series – Fall 2025 (draft schedule)"

apavlo — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 14:35:51 +0000

This schedule is not finalized yet.

New comment by apavlo in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)"

apavlo — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:23:21 +0000

> I'm gonna have to implement my own buffer pool and manage my reads directly like that vexatious paper[1] said all along.

You make it sound like I was trying to troll everyone when we wrote that paper. We were warning you.

New comment by apavlo in "Bridged Indexes in OrioleDB: architecture, internals and everyday use?"

apavlo — Fri, 30 May 2025 11:31:00 +0000

"Bridged Indexes" is a non-standard term. These are just secondary indexes using logical pointers with a mapping index. IIRC, Oracle, Hana, and HyPer do the same thing.

Source: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2017/p781-wu.pdf (see Table 1 + Section 6.1)

New comment by apavlo in "ClickHouse gets lazier and faster: Introducing lazy materialization"

apavlo — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 20:40:49 +0000

> It's quite amazing how a db like this shows that all of those row-based dbs are doing something wrong

They're not "doing something wrong". They are designed differently for different target workloads.

Row-based -> OLTP -> "Fetch the entire records from order table where user_id = XYZ"

Column-based -> OLAP -> "Compute the total amount of orders from the order table grouped by month/year"

New comment by apavlo in "Firefly ‘Blue Ghost’ lunar lander touches down on the moon"

apavlo — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 03:31:52 +0000

> Any opensource libraries in that satellite's tech stack will now get to brag about "our code running on the moon" :)

A safe bet would be that SQLite is on there. It's already in airplanes / satellites.