Database Guru

The database field is filled with too much nonsense and false marketing. Database Veteran helps you see through the fog, penetrate the confusion, and strike at the core and essence of the industry.

Google recently launched a database MCP toolbox, perhaps the first production-ready solution.

Who will be revolutionized first - OLTP or OLAP? Integration vs specialization, how to choose? Where will DBAs go in the AI era? Feng’s views from the HOW 2025 conference roundtable, organized and published.

The database for the AI era has been settled. Capital markets are making intensive moves on PostgreSQL targets, with PG having become the default database for the AI era.

At PGConf.Dev 2025, Bohan Zhang from OpenAI shared a session titled Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI, giving us a peek into the database usage of a top-tier unicorn.

If you ask me, we’re on the brink of a cosmic collision in database-land, and Postgres + DuckDB is the meteor we should all be watching.

Databases are the core of business architecture, but what happens if we go further and let databases become the business architecture itself?

Is PostgreSQL the king of boring databases? Which databases show promise and punch in 2025?

This article is a comprehensive review of how hardware developments affect database design, introducing key hardware advances in networking, storage, and computing.

Percona’s CEO Peter Zaitsev recently published a blog discussing whether MySQL can still keep up with PostgreSQL’s momentum.

The Linux community is essentially imperial — and Linus himself is the earliest and most successful technical dictator. People are used to Linus’s generosity but forget this point.

Programmers are expensive, scarce biological computing cores, the anchor point of software costs — please prioritize optimizing biological cores before optimizing CPU cores.

MongoDB has a terrible track record on integrity, lackluster products and technology, gets beaten by PG in correctness, performance, and functionality, with collapsing developer reputation, declining popularity, stock price halving, and expanding losses. Provocative marketing against PG can’t save it with “good marketing.”

MongoDB 3.2’s analytics subsystem turned out to be an embedded PostgreSQL database? A whistleblowing story from MongoDB’s partner about betrayal and disillusionment.

Switzerland’s government leads the way with open source legislation, showing IT developing countries how to ensure software sovereignty and control. True autonomy and control stem from “open source communities,” not some “nationalist” style “domestic software.”

This vulnerability affects EL9, Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12. Users should promptly update OpenSSH to fix this vulnerability.

Percona founder Peter Zaitsev publicly expressed disappointment with MySQL and its IP owner Oracle in an official blog post, as well as dissatisfaction with performance degradation in newer versions. This is indeed a signal worth attention.

Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona (an important company in the MySQL ecosystem), wrote an article harshly criticizing Oracle’s actions and inactions that killed MySQL.

MySQL performance degrades with higher versions? While PostgreSQL advances triumphantly, eating the database world, MySQL’s performance and features are being left further behind. Why has MySQL stagnated under Oracle? I think it’s mainly the fault of cloud vendors freeloading - PG should take warning.

Friends often ask me, can Chinese domestic databases really compete? To be honest, it’s a question that offends people. So let’s try speaking with data - I hope the charts provided in this article can help readers understand the database ecosystem landscape and establish more accurate proportional awareness.

Today we discuss the fair pricing of commercial databases, open-source databases, cloud databases, and domestic Chinese databases.

Redis “going non-open source” is not a disgrace to Redis, but a disgrace to “open source/OSI” and even more so to public cloud. What truly matters has always been software freedom, while open source is just one means to achieve software freedom.

MySQL’s transaction ACID has flaws and doesn’t match documentation promises. This may lead to serious correctness issues - use with caution.

Whether databases should be housed in Kubernetes/Docker remains highly controversial. It has fundamental drawbacks with stateful services.

Vector storage and retrieval is a real need, but specialized vector databases are already dead. Small needs are solved by OpenAI directly, standard needs are captured by existing mature databases with vector extensions. The ecological niche left for specialized vector databases might support one company, but trying to build an industry around AI stories is impossible.

Many “domestic databases” are just shoddy, inferior products that can’t be helped. Xinchuang domestic OS/databases are essentially IT pre-made meals in schools. Users hold their noses while migrating, developers pretend to work hard, and everyone plays along with leaders who neither understand nor care about technology. The infrastructure software industry isn’t being strangled by anyone - the real chokehold comes from the so-called “insiders.”

RHEL-series OS distribution compatibility level: RHEL = Rocky ≈ Anolis > Alma > Oracle » Euler. Recommend using RockyLinux 8.8, or Anolis 8.8 for domestic requirements.

When we talk about self-reliance and control, what are we really talking about? Operational self-reliance vs. R&D self-reliance - what nations/users truly need is the former, not flashy “self-research”.

The cost-cutting and efficiency imperative has triggered a reevaluation of all technologies, including databases. This series will critique hot technologies in the DB field and pose fundamental questions about their trade-offs in today’s context.

Similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, user demands for databases also have a progressive hierarchy: physiological needs, safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs, cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, self-actualization needs, and transcendence needs.

Even Amazon, the SOA exemplar, thinks microservices and serverless suck. Are microservice architectures still a good idea? Amazon’s Prime Video team published a very compelling case study explaining why they abandoned microservices and serverless architecture.

As hardware technology advances, the capacity and performance of standalone databases have reached unprecedented heights. which makes distributed (TP) databases appear utterly powerless, much like the “data middle platform,” donning the emperor’s new clothes in a state of self-deception.

This article argues that in 2020, the enemy of computing freedom is cloud software, and advocates for the concept of local-first software.

Thou shalt not run a prod database inside a container

A proper understanding of time is very helpful for correctly handling time-related issues in work and life. For example, time representation and processing in computers, as well as time handling in databases and programming languages.

Without understanding the basic principles of character encoding, even simple string operations like comparison, sorting, and random access can easily lead you into pitfalls. This article attempts to clarify these issues through a comprehensive explanation.

Concurrent programs are hard to write correctly and even harder to write well. Many programmers simply throw these problems at the database… But even the most sophisticated databases won’t help if you don’t understand concurrency anomalies and isolation levels.

The technical essence, functionality, and evolution of blockchain is distributed databases. Specifically, it’s a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (resistant to malicious node attacks) distributed (leaderless replication) database.

The term “consistency” is heavily overloaded, representing different concepts in different contexts. For example, the C in ACID and the C in CAP actually refer to different concepts.

Those who only know how to code are just programmers; learn databases well, and you can at least make a living; but for excellent engineers, merely using databases is far from enough.