Deep dives into system design, cloud architecture, and distributed systems.
26 articles • Page 2 of 3
JSON looks so simple—until Twitter discovers JavaScript can't handle their tweet IDs. Learn the four hidden problems with universal formats and when to use binary alternatives like MessagePack.
Ever wondered why you can't just dump your Python objects directly to disk and expect Java to read them? Discover why encoding matters, why pickle is dangerous, and how backward/forward compatibility enables zero-downtime deployments.
A deep dive into column-oriented storage - the secret weapon of data warehouses. Learn how columnar databases achieve massive performance gains through smart data layout, compression, and vectorized processing.
A comprehensive guide to understanding the fundamental differences between OLTP and OLAP workloads, data warehousing, ETL pipelines, and schema design patterns like star and snowflake schemas.
A comprehensive guide to database indexing structures beyond simple key-value indexes - covering secondary indexes, clustered indexes, multi-column indexes, R-Trees for spatial data, fuzzy search, and in-memory databases.
A comprehensive comparison of B-Trees and LSM-Trees - understanding write amplification, performance trade-offs, and when to choose each storage engine architecture for your workload.
Deep dive into B-Trees - the most successful data structure in database history, powering indexes in PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and virtually every relational database for over 50 years.
Deep dive into Sorted String Tables (SSTables) and Log-Structured Merge-Trees (LSM-Trees) - the storage engine architecture powering LevelDB, RocksDB, Cassandra, and modern write-optimized databases.
Learn how hash indexes work in databases by combining in-memory hash maps with append-only logs. Discover the Bitcask storage engine, compaction, and when hash indexes are the perfect choice.