databases

A talk from the Posette conference argues that PostgreSQL's reputation for poor performance is often misplaced, with the real bottleneck lying in the underlying storage layer rather than the database itself. The argument, shared by ClickHouse, has resonated with developers, many of whom see it as a useful reminder that disk configuration, latency and I/O choices frequently explain slow database behavior.

SQLite 3.54 has been released, bringing performance improvements and query optimizations to the widely used embedded database engine. Developers in open-source communities are sharing the news, highlighting the project's reputation for reliability and its role as a foundational component in countless applications, browsers and operating systems.

A research paper by Niv Dayan presents better space-time trade-offs for LSM-tree based key-value stores, the storage architecture behind databases like RocksDB and LevelDB. The work, shared as a PDF titled Dostoevsky, proposes tuning compaction and memory allocation to reduce the write amplification and storage costs that plague these systems at scale.

MLB's records show the Philadelphia Phillies defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-1 on May 25, 1948, as listed in the league's Gameday archive of historical box scores. The result comes from baseball's official historical database, which documents games from past decades. No further details about the game's events are available in the listing.

An official MLB Gameday record shows the New York Yankees beat the Washington Senators 4-0 in a game played on May 6, 1914, more than a century ago. The final score entry from baseball's archives has drawn attention from fans browsing the league's historical database. Little context is attached to the box score, leaving the exact reason for the renewed interest unclear.

MLB's Gameday archive lists a final score from July 31, 1920, with the Philadelphia Athletics defeating the Chicago White Sox 5-1. The page records the historical result as part of Major League Baseball's online database of past games, giving fans access to box scores and lineups from more than a century ago, including from the era of the infamous Black Sox scandal season.

MLB's Gameday archive shows a final score from May 25, 1948: the Baltimore Elite Giants beat the New York Cubans 10-2. Both teams played in the Negro National League in the last season before the league folded, and MLB now keeps box scores and standings from that era in its official records.

The Middle East and North Africa need to build genomic sovereignty, meaning the capacity to collect, store and analyse their own populations' genetic data rather than relying on foreign databases and institutions. Most genomic research historically underrepresents MENA populations, and regional scientists argue local biobanks, data infrastructure and research capacity are needed for better healthcare and medical research.

ClickHouse has released ClickHouse C, a library for communicating with the ClickHouse analytical database using its native binary protocol rather than the usual HTTP interface. The project, available on GitHub, is aimed at developers building fast, lightweight integrations in C or C-compatible environments. Hacker News readers are weighing its usefulness against existing client drivers and the performance benefits of the binary protocol.

Software developer and free-software figure Bradley Kuhn described writing a system of roughly 100,000 lines of Tcl embedded in the proprietary Informix database. He says he chose Tcl because embedding Perl into an application to provide a scripting language was extremely difficult at the time, while Tcl was designed from the start for exactly that purpose. The remark has drawn attention as a first-hand account of late-1990s scripting language trade-offs.