Top all-time · #6673
Peter Geoghegan
Personal blog · pgeoghegan.blogspot.comprogrammingsystemsdata
Peter Geoghegan's personal blog at pgeoghegan.blogspot.com covers programming, systems and data. Since 2011, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “Exploiting locality to improve PostgreSQL's text sort performance”. The last post was in 2019, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Blog of PostgreSQL developer Peter Geoghegan, covering database performance topics such as write throughput, sorting and abbreviated keys, clang builds, and power consumption. Commenters link its posts as technical background.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Musings on PostgreSQL, database technology in general, and software development
Most-linked posts?
- Exploiting locality to improve PostgreSQL's text sort performance3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-01-24
- PostgreSQL Index bloat under a microscope3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-07-19
- Could Clang displace GCC generally? Part II: Performance of PostgreSQL binaries2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-07-28
What Hacker News says?
http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2012/06/towards-14000-write-t... may interest you
Comment linking /2012/06/towards-14000-write-transactions-on-my.html
on “PostgreSQL as Schemaless Database [pdf]”Submitted Clang now builds Postgres without additional warnings as a story · 94 points
HN discussionRight now it's more useful for uncovering bugs, I don't think anyone would recommend running Postgres compiled with clang on a production system. For more info about performance, see http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2011/07/could-clang-displace-...
Comment linking /2011/07/could-clang-displace-gcc-generally-part.html
on “Clang now builds Postgres without additional warnings”Submitted Sorting of integers and floats 23% faster in PostgreSQL 9.2 (long explanation) as a story · 69 points
HN discussionPeter is awesome and is also primarily responsible for a bunch of power consumption improvements: http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2012/01/power-consumption-in-...
Comment linking /2012/01/power-consumption-in-postgres-92.html
on “Sorting of integers and floats 23% faster in PostgreSQL 9.2 (long explanation)”Submitted PostgreSQL corruption detection tool detects “freeze-the-dead” bug as a story · 10 points
HN discussionSorting will be a lot faster on PostgreSQL 9.5: http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2015/01/abbreviated-keys-expl... http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2015/04/abbreviated-keys-for-... I wonder whether and to what extent Vitesse benefits from using this technique, which is fairly well known (e.g. it appears in a 1994 paper by Gray -- Alphasort). As I go into in the second link there, someone reported an order of magnitude in…
Comment linking /2015/04/abbreviated-keys-for-numeric-to.html
on “Vitesse X – A PostgreSQL extension module for faster queries”Submitted What I Think of Jsonb as a story · 6 points
HN discussionA possibly counterintuitive case where "the key...is expensive to compute" can be when accessing the key just requires following a pointer to something not in cache. It's not the same thing syntactically, but, for example, Postgres sped up collation by packing bytes into integers: http://pgeoghegan.blogspot.com/2015/01/abbreviated-keys-expl... I've also seen speedups sorting strings by first sorting prefixes of them…
Comment linking /2015/01/abbreviated-keys-exploiting-locality-to.html
on “Schwartzian Transform”Submitted PostgreSQL Index bloat under a microscope as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted PostgreSQL Index bloat under a microscope as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted PostgreSQL Index bloat under a microscope as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Visualizing a column's space overhead using pg_hexedit as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted pg_hexedit now supports GiST, GIN, and hash indexes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pg_hexedit: Rich hex editor annotations for Postgres relfiles as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exploiting locality to improve PostgreSQL's text sort performance as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Abbreviated keys: exploiting locality to improve Postgre sort performance (2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted PostgreSQL Index bloat under a microscope as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Could Clang displace GCC generally? Part II: Performance of PostgreSQL binaries as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
