This is cross-posted from the WorkWhile engineering blog.

This post describes a data pipeline we built to convert an analytical SQL query into an aggressively cached JSON API with zero load on our database or application.

Contents

• Motivation
• Core problem
• Cloud primitives for the win
• Conclusion

Motivation

WorkWhile is the …

This is cross-posted from the WorkWhile engineering blog.

This post describes a zero-downtime schema change to a high contention table — guided (and greatly accelerated) by ChatGPT.

Contents

• We made the wrong assumption
• Online migrations and table contention
• I get by with a little help from my (AI) friend
• Add new …

It turns out it's quite straightforward to construct an "almost unique" constraint in PostgreSQL via EXCLUDE.

I was recently stuck in a jam in our PostgreSQL database during a feature migration. We needed a "partial UNIQUE" constraint and I was surprised to find out that PostgreSQL doesn't support them^{1 …}

This post was included in Golang Weekly issue 499. This is cross-posted from the Hardfin engineering blog.

The Go standard library uses a single overloaded type as a stand-in for both full datetimes¹ and dates. This mostly "just works", but slowly starts to degrade correctness in codebases where both …

Below, we'll show two facts which help understand the positive integer solutions to the following diophantine equation:

We'll show that there is a lone positive root and …