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Blog on CedarDB
Company blog · cedardb.com/blogdatasystemsprogramming
Blog on CedarDB is the company blog at cedardb.com, writing about data, systems and programming. Since 2024, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 73 times, most often “We ported the original Doom to SQL”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-23, and you can follow it by feed.
CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools and tomorrow’s challenges.
Most-linked posts?
- /7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2024-05-02
- We ported the original Doom to SQL6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2026-09-22
- Optimize the Data Layout5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-10-08
- Why German Strings Are Everywhere4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-07-16
- Can You Do Both: Fast Scans and Fast Writes in a Single System?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-08-13
- A Deep Dive into German Strings3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-07-30
- CedarDB: German-Powered, PostgreSQL-Compatiable Freak of Nature Database System3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-28
- Simple, Efficient, and Robust Hash Tables for Join Processing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-06-05
- Generating tailored and efficient code for every query3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-02
- The Decline and Fall of In-Memory Database Systems2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-03
What Hacker News says?
Great heads up. I wonder about graph databases. He mentioned < https://umbra-db.com/ > and < https://cedardb.com/ > both include the graph use case and I wonder how they compare to < https://neo4j.com/ >.
Comment linking /
on “Databases in 2024: A Year in Review”Submitted We ported the original Doom to SQL as a story · 339 points
HN discussionKind of, with caveats. For one "extensions can interfere with each other and cause incorrect behavior" [1], and the practicallity of implementations varies. Say, Cypher queries using AGE can be order of magnitude slower than using a dedicated graph DB [2]. Yes, you can drive a Ford Falcon coast-to-coast, but how much gas are you going to spend? Postgres is a solid database but has roots in the 80s. Optimizing for mo…
Comment linking /blog/ode_to_postgres/
on “PostgreSQL is the Database Management System of the Year 2024”Submitted Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL as a story · 255 points
HN discussionThis is a clever ad! I had not heard of them so I looked up the technology behind it: https://cedardb.com/docs/technology/ A Postgresql-compatible HTAP. It appears to be single server and closed source. Roadmap: https://cedardb.com/docs/roadmap/
Comment linking /docs/roadmap/
on “Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL”Submitted Optimistic Locking in B-Trees as a story · 184 points
HN discussionIt seems to be a quote from https://cedardb.com/blog/german_strings/ which is about this German Strings type (implemented in Polars) But yeah, it's pretty ignorant to assume Rust can't do this since the best available examples (as with many things) are in Rust. CompactString is really nice. On a typical modern (64-bit) computer CompactString takes 24 bytes and holds up to 24 bytes of UTF-8 text inline, while also ha…
Comment linking /blog/german_strings/
on “Why Polars rewrote its Arrow string data type”Submitted When are SSDs slow? as a story · 133 points
HN discussionIt looks a lot like cedarDB's "german strings". < https://cedardb.com/blog/german_strings/ > You could probably write a C++ implementation based on the article. Note that it's not all that useful if you don't plan on searching for text based on their prefix. From my understanding, this is mostly a better way to store SStables in RAM/partially on disk if you mmap.
Comment linking /blog/german_strings/
on “Why Polars rewrote its Arrow string data type”Submitted Why I Prefer Exceptions to Error Values as a story · 48 points
HN discussionI think the upcoming CedarDB is HTAP? https://cedardb.com/ Clickhouse performance for Postgres workloads?
Comment linking /
on “HTAP is Dead”Submitted Optimize the Data Layout as a story · 45 points
HN discussionYep, and the work on https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/dis/research/leanstore/ that preceded it. And CedarDB https://cedardb.com/ the more commercialized product that is following up on some of this research, including employing many of the key researchers.
Comment linking /
on “What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?”Submitted How to Correctly Sum Up Numbers as a story · 41 points
HN discussionThere are TPC-H numbers in another post: https://cedardb.com/blog/simple_efficient_hash_tables/
Comment linking /blog/simple_efficient_hash_tables/
on “When are SSDs slow?”Submitted Simple, Efficient, and Robust Hash Tables for Join Processing as a story · 40 points
HN discussionSlightly off-topic but CedarDB is extremely exciting. It's the commercialization of the widely cited Umbra research DBMS [0] that has been in the works for several years, which benchmarks faster than DuckDB for OLAP [1] whilst simultaneously being really strong for transactional workloads. Also discussed recently here [2]. [0] https://umbra-db.com/ [1] https://cedardb.com/blog/ode_to_postgres/ [2] https://news.ycomb…
Comment linking /blog/ode_to_postgres/
on “When are SSDs slow?”Submitted Why German Strings Are Everywhere as a story · 35 points
HN discussionI'm really curious about the capabilities of https://cedardb.com/ they claim that they can make a single DB that does both OLTP and OLAP. It's basically the production version of umbra.
Comment linking /
on “Scalable OLTP in the Cloud: What's the Big Deal?”Submitted CedarDB: German-Powered, PostgreSQL-Compatiable Freak of Nature Database System as a story · 29 points
HN discussionHere is the paper in question: Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance https://db.in.tum.de/~freitag/papers/p29-neumann-cidr20.pdf Section 3.1 covers string handling. This article (also linked from tfa) explains German strings in more detail. https://cedardb.com/blog/german_strings
Comment linking /blog/german_strings
on “Das Problem mit German Strings”Submitted The CedarDB Community Edition as a story · 12 points
HN discussionDepends on your use case. Redis is a key-value store that is optimized for simpler workloads and is designed as a caching layer. Umbra, on the other hand, is a full fledged, ACID compliant relational database systems with all bells and whistles. However, Umbra can process multiple 100ks of transactions per second. If you're interested in more details, take a look at Figure 6 in this research paper: https://db.in.tum…
Comment linking /
on “Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance [pdf]”Submitted A Deep Dive into German Strings as a story · 10 points
HN discussionUmbra was recently spun out as CedarDB [1]. And Hyper is alive and well at Salesforce/Tableau! The team working on it is still in large parts the original Hyper team from TUM. You can actually download Hyper (as a binary with language bindings) and play around with it [2] for non-commercial use cases. If you think Hyper/Umbra is cool, the TUM database group has lots of other very interesting projects going on at the…
Comment linking /
on “Umbra: A Disk-Based System with In-Memory Performance [pdf]”Submitted Why You Shouldn't Forget to Optimize the Data Layout as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThis recent post resonated with me: https://cedardb.com/blog/exceptions_vs_errors/ There are certain obvious (and some less obvious) benefits to both exceptions and results, but I get the impression a lot of programmers have overreacted against exceptions. Exceptions "just work" the same in every codebase and require little boilerplate in most languages. I think results really shine for internal business logic where…
Comment linking /blog/exceptions_vs_errors/
on “Rust error handling”Submitted We ported the original Doom to SQL as a story · 9 points
HN discussionhttps://cedardb.com/docs/technology talks about the technical details on how they maximize their usage of available cores and RAM, and their query optimizer.
Comment linking /docs/technology
on “CedarDB: German-Powered, PostgreSQL-Compatiable Freak of Nature Database System”Submitted The Hidden Cost of Data Movement as a story · 8 points
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