Blog Columns
Six thematic columns, each with its own dedicated RSS feed.
Database Guru
75posts
Database news, industry surveys, architecture, and best practices.
Cloud-Exiter
66posts
Cloud economics, repatriation, and building sovereign infrastructure.
Postgres Mage
126posts
PostgreSQL ecosystem, internals, extensions, and production tuning.
AI Agent Explorer
97posts
Practical engineering with coding agents, LLMs, AI4DB, and DB4AI.
Travel Notes
12posts
Trips, hikes, landscapes, and field notes across mountains and seas.
Miscellaneous
40posts
Essays, reflections, and personal writing inside and outside of tech.
Pigsty v4.0: Into the AI Era
Pigsty v4.0 is a milestone release — what I'd call "Finished Software." The real theme: Built for AI Agents and enabling the DBA Agent.
Don't run AI assistant on cloud
When launch clawdbot on the cloud, you're handing over cognitive data to the vendor. There's a reason why people by Mac mini rather than running clawdbot on the cloud.
From AGPL to Apache: Why I Changed Pigsty's License
Pigsty switched from AGPLv3 to Apache 2.0. Aren't you worried about freeloaders? Freeloaders welcome — if you want to become the Debian of databases, a permissive license is table stakes.
Agent OS: We're Building DOS Again
LLM = CPU. Context = RAM. Database = Disk. Agent = App. The mapping is surprisingly clean. And if OS history is any guide, we may know what comes next — and what's still missing.
Typeless: A Semantic Voice Input Method Built for Vibe Coding
Why type when you can talk? Typeless uses an LLM to turn messy spoken thoughts into clean prose, making voice-driven vibe coding surprisingly smooth—and it comes with a free one-month trial.
Claude Code Observability
Export Claude Code's OTEL logs and metrics to Victoria stack, visualize with Grafana dashboards.
How to Actually Do PostgreSQL High Availability
A deep dive into the SOTA approach for PostgreSQL HA. RTO/RPO breakdown, from theory to production. If you're still wrestling with PG HA, this might save you years.
The Last Day of a 32-Year-Old Programmer
Sudden death from overwork is tragic enough, but what cuts deeper is that even death cannot hit the pause button. A heartbreaking case.
How to Pay for ChatGPT and Claude in China with Visa and Apple Pay
Starting January 15, 2026, Visa credit cards issued by mainland Chinese banks officially support Apple Pay—opening a clean, low-cost way to subscribe to overseas services like ChatGPT and Claude.
Self-Hosting Databases Off the Cloud: From Artisanal Craft to Industrial Engineering
"I'm not afraid of hard engineering—I'm afraid of being held hostage." Founders hesitate to leave the cloud not because of technical complexity, but because of key-person risk. The fix: decouple …
How to Get Up to Speed with PostgreSQL Fast
People keep asking me how to get started with PostgreSQL. Instead of repeating myself, here is a 10-minute guide that sets you up with a production-grade environment and a patient AI tutor.
China's Domestic Database Industry: I'm Past the Stage of Being Angry
After Bank of China's mobile app crashed on New Year's Day over a domestic database failure, people asked for my take. We watched them build a tower of hype, and now we watch it crumble. Anger is for …
Claude Code Quick Start: Using Alternative LLMs at 1/10 the Cost
How to install and use Claude Code? How to achieve similar results at 1/10 of Claude's cost with alternative models? A one-liner to get CC up and running!
2025 Year in Review: A Turning Point
2025 felt unusually long. AI gave me a twentyfold productivity boost and gave Pigsty a real shot at competing with world-class distributions. From an independent open-source project growing against …
Git for Data: Instant PostgreSQL Database Cloning
How to instantly clone a massive PostgreSQL database without consuming extra storage? PostgreSQL 18 and XFS can spark some serious magic.
Did RedNote Exit the Cloud?
When a company that was "born on the cloud" goes "self-host first," does that count as cloud exit? A repost of a deleted piece on the infrastructure coming-of-age for China's internet giants.
Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker
A conversation between Mike Stonebraker (MIT CSAIL, Turing Award Winner, Creator of PostgreSQL), Andy Pavlo (Carnegie Mellon University), and the DBOS team.
What Kind of Database Do AI Agents Need?
The bottleneck for AI agents is not the database kernel, but integration above it. Muscle memory (in-database computation), associative memory (vector-graph fusion), and the courage to experiment (Git …
MySQL and Baijiu: The Internet’s Obedience Test
MySQL is to the internet what baijiu is to China: harsh, hard to swallow, yet worshipped because culture demands obedience. Both are loyalty tests—will you endure discomfort to fit in?
Victoria: The Observability Stack That Slaps the Industry
VictoriaMetrics is brutally efficient—using a fraction of Prometheus + Loki’s resources for multiples of the performance. Pigsty v4 swaps to the Victoria stack; here’s the beta for anyone eager to try …
MinIO Is Dead. Who Picks Up the Pieces?
MinIO just entered maintenance mode. What replaces it? Can RustFS step in? I tested the contenders so you don’t have to.
Alipay, Taobao, Xianyu Went Dark. Smells Like a Message Queue Meltdown.
Dec 4, 2025, Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu all cratered. Users got charged while orders still showed “unpaid,” a carbon copy of the 2024 Double-11 fiasco.
MinIO is Dead
MinIO announces it is entering maintenance mode, the dragon-slayer has become the dragon – how MinIO transformed from an open-source S3 alternative to just another commercial software company
Pigsty v3.7: Magneto Award and PG18 Ready
PostgreSQL 18 becomes the default version, EL10 and Debian 13 support added, extensions reach 437, and Pigsty wins the PostgreSQL Magneto Award.
Pigsty v4.0: Into the AI Era
Pigsty v4.0 is a milestone release — what I'd call "Finished Software." The real theme: Built for AI Agents and enabling the DBA Agent.
Don't run AI assistant on cloud
When launch clawdbot on the cloud, you're handing over cognitive data to the vendor. There's a reason why people by Mac mini rather than running clawdbot on the cloud.
From AGPL to Apache: Why I Changed Pigsty's License
Pigsty switched from AGPLv3 to Apache 2.0. Aren't you worried about freeloaders? Freeloaders welcome — if you want to become the Debian of databases, a permissive license is table stakes.
Agent OS: We're Building DOS Again
LLM = CPU. Context = RAM. Database = Disk. Agent = App. The mapping is surprisingly clean. And if OS history is any guide, we may know what comes next — and what's still missing.
Typeless: A Semantic Voice Input Method Built for Vibe Coding
Why type when you can talk? Typeless uses an LLM to turn messy spoken thoughts into clean prose, making voice-driven vibe coding surprisingly smooth—and it comes with a free one-month trial.
Claude Code Observability
Export Claude Code's OTEL logs and metrics to Victoria stack, visualize with Grafana dashboards.
How to Actually Do PostgreSQL High Availability
A deep dive into the SOTA approach for PostgreSQL HA. RTO/RPO breakdown, from theory to production. If you're still wrestling with PG HA, this might save you years.
The Last Day of a 32-Year-Old Programmer
Sudden death from overwork is tragic enough, but what cuts deeper is that even death cannot hit the pause button. A heartbreaking case.
How to Pay for ChatGPT and Claude in China with Visa and Apple Pay
Starting January 15, 2026, Visa credit cards issued by mainland Chinese banks officially support Apple Pay—opening a clean, low-cost way to subscribe to overseas services like ChatGPT and Claude.
Self-Hosting Databases Off the Cloud: From Artisanal Craft to Industrial Engineering
"I'm not afraid of hard engineering—I'm afraid of being held hostage." Founders hesitate to leave the cloud not because of technical complexity, but because of key-person risk. The fix: decouple …
How to Get Up to Speed with PostgreSQL Fast
People keep asking me how to get started with PostgreSQL. Instead of repeating myself, here is a 10-minute guide that sets you up with a production-grade environment and a patient AI tutor.
China's Domestic Database Industry: I'm Past the Stage of Being Angry
After Bank of China's mobile app crashed on New Year's Day over a domestic database failure, people asked for my take. We watched them build a tower of hype, and now we watch it crumble. Anger is for …
Claude Code Quick Start: Using Alternative LLMs at 1/10 the Cost
How to install and use Claude Code? How to achieve similar results at 1/10 of Claude's cost with alternative models? A one-liner to get CC up and running!
2025 Year in Review: A Turning Point
2025 felt unusually long. AI gave me a twentyfold productivity boost and gave Pigsty a real shot at competing with world-class distributions. From an independent open-source project growing against …
Git for Data: Instant PostgreSQL Database Cloning
How to instantly clone a massive PostgreSQL database without consuming extra storage? PostgreSQL 18 and XFS can spark some serious magic.
Did RedNote Exit the Cloud?
When a company that was "born on the cloud" goes "self-host first," does that count as cloud exit? A repost of a deleted piece on the infrastructure coming-of-age for China's internet giants.
Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker
A conversation between Mike Stonebraker (MIT CSAIL, Turing Award Winner, Creator of PostgreSQL), Andy Pavlo (Carnegie Mellon University), and the DBOS team.
What Kind of Database Do AI Agents Need?
The bottleneck for AI agents is not the database kernel, but integration above it. Muscle memory (in-database computation), associative memory (vector-graph fusion), and the courage to experiment (Git …
MySQL and Baijiu: The Internet’s Obedience Test
MySQL is to the internet what baijiu is to China: harsh, hard to swallow, yet worshipped because culture demands obedience. Both are loyalty tests—will you endure discomfort to fit in?
Victoria: The Observability Stack That Slaps the Industry
VictoriaMetrics is brutally efficient—using a fraction of Prometheus + Loki’s resources for multiples of the performance. Pigsty v4 swaps to the Victoria stack; here’s the beta for anyone eager to try …
MinIO Is Dead. Who Picks Up the Pieces?
MinIO just entered maintenance mode. What replaces it? Can RustFS step in? I tested the contenders so you don’t have to.
Alipay, Taobao, Xianyu Went Dark. Smells Like a Message Queue Meltdown.
Dec 4, 2025, Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu all cratered. Users got charged while orders still showed “unpaid,” a carbon copy of the 2024 Double-11 fiasco.
MinIO is Dead
MinIO announces it is entering maintenance mode, the dragon-slayer has become the dragon – how MinIO transformed from an open-source S3 alternative to just another commercial software company
Pigsty v3.7: Magneto Award and PG18 Ready
PostgreSQL 18 becomes the default version, EL10 and Debian 13 support added, extensions reach 437, and Pigsty wins the PostgreSQL Magneto Award.
Pigsty v4.0: Into the AI Era
Pigsty v4.0 is here! This is a milestone release. Pigsty is a batteries-included, open-source, local-first PostgreSQL distribution. It lets you spin up enterprise-grade PostgreSQL services without a dedicated DBA — monitoring, backup, HA, IaC, …
Pigsty v4.0 is here! This is a milestone release. Pigsty is a batteries-included, open-source, local-first PostgreSQL distribution. It lets you spin up enterprise-grade PostgreSQL services without a dedicated DBA — monitoring, backup, HA, IaC, …
Don't run AI assistant on cloud
Before you hit “one-click deploy” on that cloud AI assistant, ask yourself: what exactly are you giving up? There’s a reason why people by Mac mini rather than running clawdbot on the cloud. When AI Becomes Your Butler Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) …
Before you hit “one-click deploy” on that cloud AI assistant, ask yourself: what exactly are you giving up? There’s a reason why people by Mac mini rather than running clawdbot on the cloud. When AI Becomes Your Butler Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) …
From AGPL to Apache: Why I Changed Pigsty's License
Pigsty is a batteries-included, local-first PostgreSQL distribution. With the v4.0 release, I finally did something I’d been considering for a while: switching from AGPLv3 back to Apache 2.0. Here’s why I changed it, what it means, and my take on …
Pigsty is a batteries-included, local-first PostgreSQL distribution. With the v4.0 release, I finally did something I’d been considering for a while: switching from AGPLv3 back to Apache 2.0. Here’s why I changed it, what it means, and my take on …
Agent OS: We're Building DOS Again
2025 is the year of the coding agent explosion. Claude Code writes your code, runs your tests, fixes your bugs, and autonomously completes complex engineering tasks. It’s the second seismic shift since ChatGPT dropped. But watch how these agents …
2025 is the year of the coding agent explosion. Claude Code writes your code, runs your tests, fixes your bugs, and autonomously completes complex engineering tasks. It’s the second seismic shift since ChatGPT dropped. But watch how these agents …
Typeless: A Semantic Voice Input Method Built for Vibe Coding
Remember this meme about the hardware a vibe coder really needs in 2026? In a sense, it is already here. A while back, someone recommended a voice input tool called Typeless. After trying it out, I was genuinely impressed. Over the past couple of …
Remember this meme about the hardware a vibe coder really needs in 2026? In a sense, it is already here. A while back, someone recommended a voice input tool called Typeless. After trying it out, I was genuinely impressed. Over the past couple of …
Claude Code Observability
Yesterday I tweeted: “Built a Claude Code Grafana dashboard to see how it makes decisions, uses tools, and burns through API credits.” Didn’t expect so much interest. So let’s talk about Claude Code observability. Why Observability? Simple idea: I …
Yesterday I tweeted: “Built a Claude Code Grafana dashboard to see how it makes decisions, uses tools, and burns through API credits.” Didn’t expect so much interest. So let’s talk about Claude Code observability. Why Observability? Simple idea: I …
How to Actually Do PostgreSQL High Availability
Seven or eight years ago, I was managing a hundred large-scale PostgreSQL clusters across 200+ beefy bare-metal servers, and I started evaluating HA solutions. I went through every option with a name: Patroni, Corosync + Pacemaker, repmgr, Stolon, …
Seven or eight years ago, I was managing a hundred large-scale PostgreSQL clusters across 200+ beefy bare-metal servers, and I started evaluating HA solutions. I went through every option with a name: Patroni, Corosync + Pacemaker, repmgr, Stolon, …
The Last Day of a 32-Year-Old Programmer
Saturday morning, November 29, 2025. Guangzhou. At 8:58, emergency services (120) received the call. At 9:14, paramedics arrived on scene. At 9:46, he was transferred to the hospital; the medical chart noted, “Suspected clinical death; family …
Saturday morning, November 29, 2025. Guangzhou. At 8:58, emergency services (120) received the call. At 9:14, paramedics arrived on scene. At 9:46, he was transferred to the hospital; the medical chart noted, “Suspected clinical death; family …
How to Pay for ChatGPT and Claude in China with Visa and Apple Pay
Starting January 15, 2026, Visa credit cards issued in mainland China officially support Apple Pay. For developers and users in China, this opens up a clean, safe, and low-cost path to subscribe to overseas services like ChatGPT and Claude. As I …
Starting January 15, 2026, Visa credit cards issued in mainland China officially support Apple Pay. For developers and users in China, this opens up a clean, safe, and low-cost path to subscribe to overseas services like ChatGPT and Claude. As I …
Self-Hosting Databases Off the Cloud: From Artisanal Craft to Industrial Engineering
A few days ago, I sat down with several SaaS founders to talk about leaving the cloud. Everyone can do the math: managed cloud databases are expensive, and once you hit scale, they easily eat 20% to 30% of your margins. Yet when it comes to actually …
A few days ago, I sat down with several SaaS founders to talk about leaving the cloud. Everyone can do the math: managed cloud databases are expensive, and once you hit scale, they easily eat 20% to 30% of your margins. Yet when it comes to actually …
How to Get Up to Speed with PostgreSQL Fast
People keep asking me the same question lately: “How do I get started with PostgreSQL?” It has come up often enough that I figured I should write a proper tutorial and answer everyone at once. The best way to learn PostgreSQL is learning by …
People keep asking me the same question lately: “How do I get started with PostgreSQL?” It has come up often enough that I figured I should write a proper tutorial and answer everyone at once. The best way to learn PostgreSQL is learning by …
China's Domestic Database Industry: I'm Past the Stage of Being Angry
Early on New Year’s Day 2026, while most people were still celebrating the holiday, the Bank of China mobile app went down. Deep Dive: How a Huawei GaussDB Bug Took Down the Bank of China App on New Year’s Day The official statement said a technical …
Early on New Year’s Day 2026, while most people were still celebrating the holiday, the Bank of China mobile app went down. Deep Dive: How a Huawei GaussDB Bug Took Down the Bank of China App on New Year’s Day The official statement said a technical …
Claude Code Quick Start: Using Alternative LLMs at 1/10 the Cost
Claude Code Quick Start Guide In my 2025 Year in Review, I mentioned that Claude Code boosted my productivity by 20x over the past year. Some friends asked if I was exaggerating—not at all. If anything, I was being conservative. This thing is …
Claude Code Quick Start Guide In my 2025 Year in Review, I mentioned that Claude Code boosted my productivity by 20x over the past year. Some friends asked if I was exaggerating—not at all. If anything, I was being conservative. This thing is …
2025 Year in Review: A Turning Point
2025 felt unusually long. Not because it was hard, but because it stood in sharp contrast to the blank, blink-and-you-missed-it feeling of the three pandemic years. When a year is dense with new information and keeps expanding the boundaries of what …
2025 felt unusually long. Not because it was hard, but because it stood in sharp contrast to the blank, blink-and-you-missed-it feeling of the three pandemic years. When a year is dense with new information and keeps expanding the boundaries of what …
Git for Data: Instant PostgreSQL Database Cloning
Every programmer has used git clone. Hit enter, wait a few seconds, and a complete code repository appears on your disk. But what about databases? Want a copy of production data for your test environment? The traditional approach is pg_dump + …
Every programmer has used git clone. Hit enter, wait a few seconds, and a complete code repository appears on your disk. But what about databases? Want a copy of production data for your test environment? The traditional approach is pg_dump + …
Did RedNote Exit the Cloud?
Original WeChat post Yesterday, I spotted a new article from RedNote’s official tech blog: “Design and Practice of Self-Built Data Centers under Hybrid Cloud Architecture.” I wrote a quick technical commentary on it. What I didn’t expect was the …
Original WeChat post Yesterday, I spotted a new article from RedNote’s official tech blog: “Design and Practice of Self-Built Data Centers under Hybrid Cloud Architecture.” I wrote a quick technical commentary on it. What I didn’t expect was the …
Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker
Transcription of Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker Data 2025: The Year in Review with Mike Stonebraker & Andy Pavlo Recorded on December 10, 2025 A conversation between Mike Stonebraker (MIT CSAIL, Turing Award Winner, Creator of …
Transcription of Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker Data 2025: The Year in Review with Mike Stonebraker & Andy Pavlo Recorded on December 10, 2025 A conversation between Mike Stonebraker (MIT CSAIL, Turing Award Winner, Creator of …
What Kind of Database Do AI Agents Need?
When we talk about “databases for the AI era,” it is easy to fall into a familiar trap: assuming the shift requires a brand-new storage engine, a revolutionary index structure, or a disruptive query language. But a clear-eyed look at the problem …
When we talk about “databases for the AI era,” it is easy to fall into a familiar trap: assuming the shift requires a brand-new storage engine, a revolutionary index structure, or a disruptive query language. But a clear-eyed look at the problem …
MySQL and Baijiu: The Internet’s Obedience Test
1. Two Painful Shots Remember your first sip of baijiu? It scorched down your throat like a wire of fire. Your face contorted, eyes watered, stomach flipped. Every instinct screamed: this isn’t food, it’s poison. The senior at the table grinned: …
1. Two Painful Shots Remember your first sip of baijiu? It scorched down your throat like a wire of fire. Your face contorted, eyes watered, stomach flipped. Every instinct screamed: this isn’t food, it’s poison. The senior at the table grinned: …
Victoria: The Observability Stack That Slaps the Industry
I’ve spent the last few weeks preparing Pigsty v4.0. The headliner: ripping out Prometheus + Loki and dropping in the full Victoria stack. VictoriaMetrics is no-frills brute force—it just works and it’s ridiculous. The observability portion is done, …
I’ve spent the last few weeks preparing Pigsty v4.0. The headliner: ripping out Prometheus + Loki and dropping in the full Victoria stack. VictoriaMetrics is no-frills brute force—it just works and it’s ridiculous. The observability portion is done, …
MinIO Is Dead. Who Picks Up the Pieces?
MinIO announced maintenance mode two days ago. I ranted in “MinIO Is Dead” and immediately got flooded with “so what now?” The usual suspects: Ceph, RustFS, SeaweedFS, Garage. I packaged all of them for Linux (RPM/DEB) and ran them through the …
MinIO announced maintenance mode two days ago. I ranted in “MinIO Is Dead” and immediately got flooded with “so what now?” The usual suspects: Ceph, RustFS, SeaweedFS, Garage. I packaged all of them for Linux (RPM/DEB) and ran them through the …
Alipay, Taobao, Xianyu Went Dark. Smells Like a Message Queue Meltdown.
Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu simultaneously faceplanted on Dec 4. Cards were debited, yet orders sat frozen at “pending.” The story rhymes perfectly with the 2024 Double-11 outage, so the leading suspect is once again the message queue or whatever …
Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu simultaneously faceplanted on Dec 4. Cards were debited, yet orders sat frozen at “pending.” The story rhymes perfectly with the 2024 Double-11 outage, so the leading suspect is once again the message queue or whatever …
MinIO is Dead
December 3, 2025 was a day to mark in open-source software history. MinIO’s team updated the project status on GitHub, announcing the MinIO open-source project was entering “maintenance mode.” This basically declared the death of MinIO as an …
December 3, 2025 was a day to mark in open-source software history. MinIO’s team updated the project status on GitHub, announcing the MinIO open-source project was entering “maintenance mode.” This basically declared the death of MinIO as an …
Pigsty v3.7: Magneto Award and PG18 Ready
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v3.7.0 is officially released, bringing complete production-grade PostgreSQL 18 support and support for four new operating systems: Debian 13 and EL 10 across both x86_64/ARM64 architectures. Extension count has …
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v3.7.0 is officially released, bringing complete production-grade PostgreSQL 18 support and support for four new operating systems: Debian 13 and EL 10 across both x86_64/ARM64 architectures. Extension count has …