<p><strong>TLDR:</strong> Tinybird’s deployment engine now applies in-place ALTER TABLE statements instead of full table rebuilds, cutting schema change time from minutes to seconds on large tables. Netflix published details on the Live Origin system that handled 65 million concurrent streams during the Tyson vs. Paul fight. PostgreSQL 18 adds native OAuth 2.0 authentication and a new MEMORY option in EXPLAIN. A RocksDB unit test exposed a real AMD CPU bug in the RDSEED instruction, which AMD has since assigned a high-severity CVE.</p>
<hr>
<h2>Tinybird ALTER TABLE support in the deployment engine</h2>
<p>Previously, any schema change in Tinybird triggered a full create-backfill-swap cycle regardless of how trivial the operation was. The new engine classifies changes into four categories and applies in-place ALTER TABLE for supported operations: TTL changes, column additions and drops, nullable modifications, default value changes, and index changes. A deploy that previously took minutes on a 200GB table now completes in under 5 seconds. Materialized Views also get a <code>DEPLOYMENT_METHOD 'alter'</code> directive to apply query changes via <code>ALTER TABLE MODIFY QUERY</code> instead of full recreation.</p>
<h2>Netflix Live Origin: architecture behind 65M concurrent streams</h2>
<p>Netflix’s Live Origin is a custom server bridging cloud live streaming pipelines and the Open Connect CDN. The system uses dual redundant regional pipelines, predictable 2-second segment templates, and intelligent segment selection across pipelines. Storage moved from S3 to a Cassandra-backed key-value store with EVCache write-through caching, landing at 25ms median latency and 200+ Gbps read throughput. The 2024 Tyson vs. Paul fight was the stress test: 65 million concurrent streams.</p>
<h2>PostgreSQL 18: OAuth 2.0 and new EXPLAIN options</h2>
<p>PostgreSQL 18 adds native OAuth 2.0 as an authentication method, letting applications connect using identity tokens from providers like Google or Auth0 instead of static passwords. Configuration goes through <code>pg_hba.conf</code> with issuer and scope parameters. On the observability side, a new <code>MEMORY</code> option in EXPLAIN tracks planning-phase memory usage, complementing the existing BUFFERS, WAL, SETTINGS, and VERBOSE options that are still underused by most teams.</p>
<h2>RocksDB test exposes AMD CPU bug in RDSEED</h2>
<p>A RocksDB unit test added four years ago to verify random number source quality started failing intermittently. The investigation traced it to the RDSEED instruction on certain AMD processors returning 0 with a success flag far more often than expected under heavy memory load on specific cores. The bug only surfaced with libstdc++ (GCC), not libc++ (clang). AMD acknowledged it, assigned a high-severity CVE, and announced a microcode fix. Worth reading if you have any code that relies on hardware RNG quality.</p>
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<h2>Also notable</h2>
<ul>
<li><strong>Cogent Security on ClickHouse:</strong> Migrated from Postgres to ClickHouse for sub-second latency on hundreds of millions of rows; their Chart Agent improved natural language to SQL accuracy from 40% to 94%, with pre-computed projections being the single biggest driver.</li>
<li><strong>ClickHouse full-text search redesign:</strong> New block-based dictionary with front-coding compression and adaptive posting list representations (Roaring Bitmaps, VarInt, embedded) replaces the old FST-based approach, showing 7x speedup on array-tag queries.</li>
<li><strong>Tansu Kafka-compatible broker:</strong> Open source, written in Rust, stateless and leaderless, ~20MB RAM, ~10ms startup, with pluggable storage across S3, SQLite, and PostgreSQL, plus direct writes to Iceberg and Delta Lake.</li>
<li><strong>Netflix Graph Abstraction:</strong> Internal system managing 650TB+ of graph data with millisecond latency and global availability via asynchronous replication.</li>
<li><strong>Report URI Redis tuning:</strong> Increased replication backlog from 64MB to 2GB, switched to persistent connections cutting connection overhead by ~99.97%, and replaced blocking <code>hGetAll()</code> with incremental <code>hScan()</code> to avoid stalling Redis’s single-threaded loop.</li>
<li><strong>Trendyol ad packages:</strong> Replaced hardcoded NoSQL integrations with a normalized PostgreSQL schema so new ad solutions can be added by inserting rows rather than writing code.</li>
<li><strong>MotherDuck DuckLake:</strong> Positions hosted DuckLake for AI agentic workflows with per-agent compute sandboxes and 100-1000x faster metadata lookups via SQL instead of object storage file scans.</li>
<li><strong>VS Code SQL Database Projects:</strong> New Publish Dialog and Code Analysis Settings dialog bring schema deployment and static analysis rule configuration into VS Code without touching the <code>.sqlproj</code> XML directly.</li>
<li><strong>pgvector vs. dedicated vector DBs:</strong> Practical breakdown of pre-filtering and post-retrieval enrichment patterns; pgvector is a reasonable starting point for most workloads, dedicated stores make sense at billion-vector scale.</li>
<li><strong>OpenSearch named a Leader in GigaOm Vector DB Radar:</strong> Highlighted for hybrid dense/sparse vector search; the S&amp;P Global 451 report pegs the vector-supported database market at $454M in 2024 with 49% CAGR projected through 2029.</li>
</ul>


Query optimization, schema design, and data store coverage across PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and more.

Databases Digest

A developer-focused roundup covering several notable database and infrastructure stories. Tinybird's deployment engine now supports in-place ALTER TABLE operations, reducing schema change time from minutes to under 5 seconds on large tables. Netflix published details on its Live Origin architecture that handled 65 million concurrent streams during the Tyson vs. Paul fight, using Cassandra-backed storage with EVCache for 25ms median latency. PostgreSQL 18 adds native OAuth 2.0 authentication and a new MEMORY option in EXPLAIN. A RocksDB unit test uncovered a real AMD CPU bug in the RDSEED instruction under heavy memory load, now assigned a high-severity CVE with a microcode fix incoming. Also covered: ClickHouse migration wins, a Rust-based Kafka-compatible broker (Tansu), Netflix's graph data system, Redis tuning techniques, pgvector vs. dedicated vector DBs, and more.

Tinybird ships ALTER TABLE support, Netflix's live origin hits 65M concurrent streams