Database Guru
Ruohang Feng @Vonng / Pigsty
News, reports, surveys and best practices from the database industry — cutting through the marketing.
AWS Acquires DuckDB: The Duck Flies into the Amazon Rainforest
AWS bought the people who build the duck and left the duck itself to the foundation.
Apple Skipped the Event and Quietly Launched a 512 GB Mac Studio
No teaser, no rumors—the website simply changed. For local AI, this may be the most important machine of the year.
Omarchy: Is There Hope for Desktop Linux?
I installed Omarchy, then removed it. Why? Who is it for, and who isn't it for? Does the Linux desktop still have a future?
Did PostgreSQL Win Because Oracle Screwed Up?
Starting with Stonebraker's remark that PostgreSQL should "thank Oracle," this essay looks at the community's unusual governance model and the challenges it now faces.
SOW: Postpartum Care for 100,000 Packages
The hard part of maintaining a PostgreSQL distribution is not compiling packages. At 100,000 artifacts, deduplication, indexing, snapshots, atomic cutovers, and incremental publishing become the real …
OINK: After Six Years of Wrestling with Documentation Frameworks, Codex Finally Got Me Over the Line
After six years of trying eight approaches, I used Codex to combine Docsy's engineering depth, Fumadocs' modern UX, and Hugo's simple delivery model into OINK.
A Packaging Patch Has Been Corrupting Valkey's Memory Accounting Since 2017
Codex found an old Valkey bug affecting Debian's packages and every official Valkey .deb. One line in a packaging patch releases a glibc allocation with Valkey's own deallocator, so the server either …
Silo: A Maintained, MinIO-Compatible Object Store
Six months after forking MinIO, Silo has completed its rebrand, fixed 14 security issues, restored and improved the console, and grown from an emergency fork into an independent open-source project.
How a Word Dies
How did “far, far ahead,” “homegrown,” “innovation,” “domestic,” and “open source” become their own antonyms in China's tech industry? This essay traces a systemic inflation of language and …
MySQL 9.7: Same Old Leftovers, Reheated
MySQL 9.7 is the first LTS release in the 9.x line. Its vector support is still all show, its years-late optimizer is disabled by default, and three years of Innovation Releases have produced …
Two months into maintaining a MinIO fork
Two months after forking MinIO, pgsty/minio ships patches for four CVEs and related security issues. No new features — just working builds, a restored console, and timely security fixes.
Put Your AI Agent's State in a Database
Put an AI agent's working directory, configuration, and memory on a PGFS mount, and you are effectively storing its state in PostgreSQL. That gives you not only a PITR "time machine," but also a …
360 Shipped Its Wildcard TLS Private Key Inside a Public Installer
360's newly released AI Agent product shipped a public installer containing the private key for its *.myclaw.360.cn wildcard certificate. Public verification and local reproduction also exposed …
After the Debate, Let's Talk Seriously About 'Ontology'
Palantir's Ontology is, technically, data modeling. The more interesting question is how a philosophy term got repurposed to market system integration and data modeling, and why that story is so …
InsForge: A Supabase Built for Vibe Coding
InsForge tries to package PostgreSQL, auth, storage, deployment, and an MCP-facing semantic layer into a backend stack designed for AI agents. It feels like a Supabase rebuilt for the vibe-coding era. …
Palantir's Ontology Narrative
Ontology is largely a data-modeling method. In enterprise practice, much of it overlaps with familiar database concepts, while the framing can make it feel newer and more differentiated than it really …
I Finished Translating the Second Edition of DDIA: An Eight-Year Parable About AI
Codex translated DDIA's second edition in a single morning. Eight years ago, I spent three months translating the first edition by hand. The contrast reveals just how far AI has come.
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO's repo is officially archived and abandoned. And how AI Agents helped bring it back from the dead. This post explains how a community fork restores the admin console and ships binaries via CI/CD …
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.
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
AWS Acquires DuckDB: The Duck Flies into the Amazon Rainforest
Original on WeChat | August 26, 2026 On August 26, Amazon made it official: AWS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB. The deal is expected to close in early September; the price was not disclosed. The team …
Original on WeChat | August 26, 2026 On August 26, Amazon made it official: AWS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB. The deal is expected to close in early September; the price was not disclosed. The team …
Apple Skipped the Event and Quietly Launched a 512 GB Mac Studio
Original article on WeChat There was no event today. No teaser campaign. Not even a credible rumor. Apple simply updated its website and launched the new Mac mini and Mac Studio. The Mac mini now comes with the M6 or M5 Pro; the Mac Studio gets the …
Original article on WeChat There was no event today. No teaser campaign. Not even a credible rumor. Apple simply updated its website and launched the new Mac mini and Mac Studio. The Mac mini now comes with the M6 or M5 Pro; the Mac Studio gets the …
Omarchy: Is There Hope for Desktop Linux?
WeChat Omarchy has been all over my X timeline lately. It is a desktop Linux distribution by DHH, and over the past couple of days the story has flooded the Chinese internet too. I previously translated DHH’s entire move off the cloud, and I follow …
WeChat Omarchy has been all over my X timeline lately. It is a desktop Linux distribution by DHH, and over the past couple of days the story has flooded the Chinese internet too. I previously translated DHH’s entire move off the cloud, and I follow …
Did PostgreSQL Win Because Oracle Screwed Up?
Original WeChat article On August 19, 2026, The Register published an interview with Michael Stonebraker. The Turing Award winner who started the Berkeley Postgres project—and is still founding companies in his eighties—was asked why PostgreSQL had …
Original WeChat article On August 19, 2026, The Register published an interview with Michael Stonebraker. The Turing Award winner who started the Berkeley Postgres project—and is still founding companies in his eighties—was asked why PostgreSQL had …
SOW: Postpartum Care for 100,000 Packages
Today, let’s talk about Postpartum Care for Sows—a Chinese meme for the sort of absurdly specialized practical topic nobody expects to discuss. This time, the sow in question is my new open-source project, SOW. When you maintain a PostgreSQL …
Today, let’s talk about Postpartum Care for Sows—a Chinese meme for the sort of absurdly specialized practical topic nobody expects to discuss. This time, the sow in question is my new open-source project, SOW. When you maintain a PostgreSQL …
OINK: After Six Years of Wrestling with Documentation Frameworks, Codex Finally Got Me Over the Line
Building a documentation site is not hard. The hard part is keeping it useful five years later. At first, you only want to put a few Markdown files online. Then the requirements start growing on their own: full-text search, dark mode, multiple …
Building a documentation site is not hard. The hard part is keeping it useful five years later. At first, you only want to put a few Markdown files online. Then the requirements start growing on their own: full-text search, dark mode, multiple …
A Packaging Patch Has Been Corrupting Valkey's Memory Accounting Since 2017
I was updating the Redis module in Pigsty recently, adding Valkey as an alternative engine, and hit an upstream bug while packaging it. If your Valkey runs on Debian or Ubuntu, and one day the disk fills up or the data directory permissions go wrong …
I was updating the Redis module in Pigsty recently, adding Valkey as an alternative engine, and hit an upstream bug while packaging it. If your Valkey runs on Debian or Ubuntu, and one day the disk fills up or the data directory permissions go wrong …
Silo: A Maintained, MinIO-Compatible Object Store
Several months ago, I forked MinIO for a simple reason: Pigsty depended on it, and upstream had abandoned the open-source project. I said I would keep packages and security fixes flowing. Here is the recent report: The Docker image has been pulled …
Several months ago, I forked MinIO for a simple reason: Pigsty depended on it, and upstream had abandoned the open-source project. I said I would keep packages and security fixes flowing. Here is the recent report: The Docker image has been pulled …
How a Word Dies
A brief history of credibility inflation in China’s tech industry Introduction The phrase “far, far ahead” can no longer be used with a straight face. Put it in a technical document or a serious review, and readers will laugh. The phrase was used, …
A brief history of credibility inflation in China’s tech industry Introduction The phrase “far, far ahead” can no longer be used with a straight face. Put it in a technical document or a serious review, and readers will laugh. The phrase was used, …
MySQL 9.7: Same Old Leftovers, Reheated
Two years ago, I wrote MySQL Is Dead, Long Live PostgreSQL. MySQL 9.0 had just shipped, and Oracle had unveiled a VECTOR data type with great fanfare, billing it as “MySQL for the AI era.” One look was enough: it was a BLOB in a cheap disguise. No …
Two years ago, I wrote MySQL Is Dead, Long Live PostgreSQL. MySQL 9.0 had just shipped, and Oracle had unveiled a VECTOR data type with great fanfare, billing it as “MySQL for the AI era.” One look was enough: it was a BLOB in a cheap disguise. No …
Two months into maintaining a MinIO fork
Two months ago in “MinIO is Dead, Long Live MinIO,” I promised I’d keep the MinIO fork patched. The recurring objection on HN is fair: can one person actually maintain something like this? The real answer isn’t clicking fork. It’s what happens when …
Two months ago in “MinIO is Dead, Long Live MinIO,” I promised I’d keep the MinIO fork patched. The recurring objection on HN is fair: can one person actually maintain something like this? The real answer isn’t clicking fork. It’s what happens when …
Put Your AI Agent's State in a Database
A year ago, I wrote an article called PGFS: Using a Database as a Filesystem. It started with a request from the Odoo community: make files and the PostgreSQL database recoverable together with point-in-time recovery, so both could be rolled back to …
A year ago, I wrote an article called PGFS: Using a Database as a Filesystem. It started with a request from the Odoo community: make files and the PostgreSQL database recoverable together with point-in-time recovery, so both could be rolled back to …
360 Shipped Its Wildcard TLS Private Key Inside a Public Installer
The security community recently noticed something remarkable: 360’s newly released AI Agent product, 360 Secure Lobster, an OpenClaw-based one-click deployment client, shipped with the private SSL key for the wildcard certificate *.myclaw.360.cn …
The security community recently noticed something remarkable: 360’s newly released AI Agent product, 360 Secure Lobster, an OpenClaw-based one-click deployment client, shipped with the private SSL key for the wildcard certificate *.myclaw.360.cn …
After the Debate, Let's Talk Seriously About 'Ontology'
Last month I wrote a post called “The Palantir Ontology Scam”. The core point was simple and summarized in a Rosetta Stone-style comparison table: Palantir’s Ontology is, at the technical level, database modeling. Object Type is a table. Property is …
Last month I wrote a post called “The Palantir Ontology Scam”. The core point was simple and summarized in a Rosetta Stone-style comparison table: Palantir’s Ontology is, at the technical level, database modeling. Object Type is a table. Property is …
InsForge: A Supabase Built for Vibe Coding
InsForge is one of the more interesting projects I have seen recently. Its pitch is simple: a Supabase-like backend stack designed specifically for AI coding agents. Apache 2.0 licensed, roughly 2,000 GitHub stars, built around PostgreSQL + PostgREST …
InsForge is one of the more interesting projects I have seen recently. Its pitch is simple: a Supabase-like backend stack designed specifically for AI coding agents. Apache 2.0 licensed, roughly 2,000 GitHub stars, built around PostgreSQL + PostgREST …
Palantir's Ontology Narrative
I. Two Kinds of Faces By late 2025, Palantir’s market cap had blown past $400 billion — a 20x run in just two years. Every roadshow, every whitepaper, every tech blog from this company hammers the same word: Ontology. The word has been packaged as …
I. Two Kinds of Faces By late 2025, Palantir’s market cap had blown past $400 billion — a 20x run in just two years. Every roadshow, every whitepaper, every tech blog from this company hammers the same word: Ontology. The word has been packaged as …
I Finished Translating the Second Edition of DDIA: An Eight-Year Parable About AI
This morning, I ran ten Codex sessions in parallel and, in less than half a day, translated the final four newly released chapters of DDIA’s second edition. The results surprised me. Formatting, terminology, footnotes, and anchors were nearly perfect …
This morning, I ran ten Codex sessions in parallel and, in less than half a day, translated the final four newly released chapters of DDIA’s second edition. The results surprised me. Formatting, terminology, footnotes, and anchors were nearly perfect …
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO’s open-source repo has been officially archived. No more maintenance. End of an era — but open source doesn’t die that easily. I created a MinIO fork, restored the admin console, rebuilt the binary distribution pipeline, and brought it back to …
MinIO’s open-source repo has been officially archived. No more maintenance. End of an era — but open source doesn’t die that easily. I created a MinIO fork, restored the admin console, rebuilt the binary distribution pipeline, and brought it back to …
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 …
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 …