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 …

This is cross-posted from the Hardfin engineering blog.

As a small and growing team, we need to focus our operational efforts as much as possible. Using Tailscale as our VPN is very much aligned with this need. It's simple, with no central control plane to manage or other significant operational …