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TOM LANE ON THE ARCHITECTURAL DECISIONS THAT SHAPED 30 YEARS OF POSTGRES

Tom Lane, a committer for 25 of Postgres' 30 years, walks through the architectural bets that held: process-per-connection for code simplicity, write-ahead logging in 8.0 that turned it from a plaything into a serious database, and MVCC pushing maintenance work into background vacuum. He credits Berkeley's liberal license for the project surviving where its contemporaries did not, names version 13 the buggiest release, and says he would delete partitioning given the chance.

CLOUDFLOE'S QUERY ENGINE IN A CELLD CELL

Cloudfloe is a web interface for querying Iceberg data on S3 with DuckDB. This experiment tested whether a stateful, serverless-style cell could replace a per-query container: DuckDB WebAssembly read a 37,537-row Iceberg table in 148 ms, but cold or woken cells took 250–320 ms and retained most of their memory. Keeping the connection warm cut repeat queries to about 3 ms, making lifecycle policy, not raw startup, the core design tradeoff.

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