Pull to refresh

All streams

Show first
Period
Level of difficulty

PostgreSQL cost model: estimating the cost of flushing temp buffers to disk

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time8 min
Reach and readers5.8K

Today I present results from the first step towards enabling temporary tables in PostgreSQL parallel query execution: benchmarking sequential writes and reads of temp buffers. I added functions to the PostgreSQL system catalog to measure buffer flush operations and ran a set of tests. For the planner, I estimated the cost coefficient of flushing a temporary table buffer page to disk relative to the existing DEFAULT_SEQ_PAGE_COST. I also estimated the cost of a simple scan of temp buffers (a dry-run). Measurements show that sequential writes are about 30% slower than reads. Based on these results, I propose a cost formula. I also ran a limited “dry-run” style estimate and measured write speed when table blocks are distributed across memory pages randomly.

Read more

Why the Chat Control Act keeps coming up and why we shall not forget about it

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time5 min
Reach and readers8.2K

The Art of Comeback of the European Bureaucracy 

On November 26, Members of the European Parliament rejected the Chat Control Act in its current version, i.e, mandatory scanning of the user traffic before it gets encrypted. Lawmakers, however, will hardly give up: requirement for mandatory scanning shall be reconsidered every three years. Xeovo explains what is the story behind this law and why, in reality, there’s little justification for passing it.

Read more

Bulletproof VPNs: What Are They and Why You’re Not Their Audience

Reading time6 min
Reach and readers3.2K

In November, 2025 Russia-based web host Media Land was sanctioned by several countries as a bulletproof service — the one hackers relied on to launch DDoS attacks and attack businesses in the United States and in allied countries. “Bulletproof” may refer to a VPN as well, as it usually means abuse resistant and private. Xeovo explains how genuinely reliable anonymous VPNs and hostings differ from bulletproof services — and why the real bulletproof operators are often not those who call themselves that.

Read more

What will enterprise databases look like in the age of AI

Level of difficultyEasy
Reading time5 min
Reach and readers8K

There’s a dangerous illusion that “vanilla” open source is a silver bullet for enterprise systems. A real-world stress test of recent years has shown the opposite: when familiar giants like Oracle step aside, plain PostgreSQL often turns into a pumpkin under true enterprise workloads.

Mark Rivkin, Head of technical consulting at Postgres Professional, shares his personal perspective on why teams end up reinventing the wheel — adding millions of lines of code to the core — and why the future belongs to converged database systems.

Disclaimer: this article reflects the author’s independent expert opinion.

Read more