Best of Database — November 2025

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Article
Vlad Mihalcea·25w
Just Use Postgres!
A comprehensive review of Denis Magda's book covering PostgreSQL's capabilities beyond traditional relational features. The 402-page guide explores core database concepts like indexing (B+Tree, hash, partial), transactions, and modern SQL features (CTEs, window functions), then dives into non-relational capabilities including JSON storage and full-text search. The book examines PostgreSQL's extension ecosystem: pgvector for ML/GenAI embeddings, TimescaleDB for time series data, PostGIS for geospatial queries, and pgmq for message queues. Includes performance tuning guidance and discusses when PostgreSQL might not be the right choice.
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Article
Product Hunt·26w
Reindeer: Cursor for databases
Reindeer is an AI-powered IDE for database work that understands database schemas and generates production-ready SQL queries. It features autocomplete for complex SQL, automatic query fixing, and schema-aware assistance to streamline debugging and query optimization workflows without switching between tools.
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Groww Engineering·27w
When Two Databases Become One: How DuckDB Saved Our Trading Operations from Manual Reconciliation
A trading platform faced recurring position-order mismatches across two separate MySQL databases, requiring 20-30 minutes of manual reconciliation by two engineers. By leveraging DuckDB's MySQL scanner extension to perform cross-database joins, they automated the entire process into a 2-3 minute operation running every 15 minutes. The solution eliminated manual intervention, improved accuracy from 85% to 99.9%, and enabled proactive monitoring instead of reactive fixes during market hours.
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Video
Kiki's Bytes·27w
How Figma Scaled To 10 Million Users
Figma scaled from a single PostgreSQL database to a horizontally sharded architecture supporting 10 million users. The journey involved three phases: immediate relief through vertical scaling, read replicas, and connection pooling; medium-term stability via logical partitioning of table groups into dedicated databases; and long-term scalability through horizontal sharding with a custom query router. Key innovations included optimized logical replication by removing indexes during migration, two-phase deployment using PG Bouncer for safe routing changes, logical sharding with PostgreSQL views for testing before physical splits, and a custom Golang DB proxy for intelligent query routing across shards.
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Article
Neon·25w
Why So Many Projects in the Neon Free Plan?
Neon has increased its Free Plan from 10 to 60 projects due to infrastructure efficiency gains and integration with Databricks. The expansion is enabled by Neon's architecture that separates compute and storage, scales to zero when idle, and uses object storage as the source of truth. Rather than maximizing profit margins, Neon aims to make its Free Plan genuinely useful for developers building side projects, prototypes, and small apps, positioning itself as the default Postgres provider.
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Article
PostgreSQL·26w
pg_ai_query — AI-powered SQL generation & query analysis for PostgreSQL
pg_ai_query is a new PostgreSQL extension that enables AI-powered SQL query generation and analysis directly within Postgres. Developers can generate SQL queries from natural language descriptions and get AI-assisted explanations of query execution plans. The extension supports PostgreSQL 14+ and aims to streamline query development by eliminating the need to switch between tools.
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Article
Convex·27w
Convex raises $24M to reinvent backends
Convex announced a $24M Series A funding round led by a16z and Spark Capital to scale their backend platform. The company has grown 10x in customer base and revenue over nine months, with customers ranging from hackathon teams to enterprises. The funding will support hiring, developing new features like OLAP support and local-first sync, and building a sustainable, profitable business. Convex plans to enhance their component marketplace, improve their open-source self-hosted edition, and optimize infrastructure costs to ensure long-term viability for customers building on their platform.
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Article
Grafana Labs·27w
Understand, diagnose, and optimize SQL queries: Introducing Grafana Cloud Database Observability
Grafana Cloud Database Observability is now in public preview, offering developers, SREs, and DBAs tools to understand, diagnose, and optimize SQL queries. The solution addresses the visibility gap in database performance by providing query-level insights, execution plans, wait event analysis, and AI-powered optimization suggestions. It supports MySQL and PostgreSQL, integrates with Grafana Alloy for telemetry collection, and correlates database metrics with application and infrastructure data for comprehensive system-wide performance analysis.
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Article
InfoQ·25w
Stripe's Zero-Downtime Data Movement Platform Migrates Petabytes with Millisecond Traffic Switches
Stripe developed a Zero-Downtime Data Movement Platform that migrates petabyte-scale databases with traffic switches completing in milliseconds to 2 seconds. The system handles 5 million queries per second across 2,000+ MongoDB shards using a six-phase process: migration registration, bulk import (10x faster through B-tree-optimized inserts), bidirectional async replication, validation, versioned gating for traffic cutover, and cleanup. The platform enables horizontal scaling, shard merging, version upgrades, and tenancy transitions while maintaining 99.9995% reliability for $1.4 trillion in annual transactions.
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Article
InfluxData·26w
Introducing the New Cloud Dedicated Admin UI
InfluxData has released a major update to the Cloud Dedicated Admin UI, introducing live cluster observability dashboards with CPU, memory, and request rate metrics. The update includes redesigned navigation for quick access to databases, tables, and tokens, plus enhanced table schema browsing with column type filtering. Users can now monitor cluster performance across different time periods and switch between multiple accounts and clusters directly from the interface.
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Article
Neon·28w
Major compute price reduction on Neon
Neon announces up to 25% compute price reductions across all paid plans, with Launch Plan dropping to $0.106 per CU-hour and Scale Plan to $0.222 per CU-hour. This follows previous cost cuts including storage reduction from $1.75 to $0.35 per GB-month and removal of the $599/month enterprise feature surcharge. Running on Databricks' infrastructure enables these lower prices while maintaining autoscaling capabilities that scale compute to zero when idle. Real-world comparisons show Neon costs 30-60% less than alternatives like Aurora Serverless v2 and Supabase across different usage scenarios.
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Article
ByteByteGo·28w
How Datadog Built a Custom Database to Ingest Billions of Metrics Per Second
Datadog built Monocle, a custom time-series database in Rust, to handle billions of metrics per second. The system uses Kafka for data distribution and replication, separates metadata storage from time-series data, and employs a thread-per-core architecture with LSM-tree storage. Key optimizations include arena allocators, time-based file pruning, and cost-based query scheduling. The platform splits storage into real-time (24 hours) and long-term systems, with the real-time database handling 99% of queries. Future plans include dynamic load balancing and merging separate databases into a unified columnar format.
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Article
PostgreSQL·25w
Autobase 2.5.0 released
Autobase 2.5.0 introduces Expert Mode to its UI, enabling advanced cluster configuration options for experienced users. Key features include a YAML editor for custom parameters, updated cloud provider pricing and instance specifications (Hetzner ARM instances, 4th-gen Intel on AWS/GCP), configurable IOPS and throughput for AWS EBS volumes, and Ansible 12 compatibility. Autobase is an open-source tool for deploying and managing highly available PostgreSQL clusters, automating tasks like deployment, failover, backups, and scaling without requiring deep DBA expertise.
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Article
CNCF·28w
Announcing Vitess 23.0.0
Vitess 23.0.0 introduces MySQL 8.4.6 as the default version, enhanced observability with new metrics for transaction routing and recovery tracking, and improved operational tooling for VTOrc. The release removes deprecated metrics and APIs, strengthens topology management with better Consul authentication requirements, and includes critical upgrade instructions for Operator users migrating from MySQL 8.0 to 8.4. Key improvements focus on production reliability, monitoring precision, and simplified deployment workflows for horizontally scaled MySQL workloads.
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Article
Hashrocket·28w
PostgreSQL 18 - Temporal Constraints
PostgreSQL 18 introduces temporal constraints with the WITHOUT OVERLAPS syntax, enabling enforcement of uniqueness across time periods using date or timestamp ranges. This feature prevents overlapping data in scenarios like subscription management, where users can have multiple historical records but only one active entry at a time. The implementation uses range types (daterange or timestamprange) with GIST indexes and requires the btree_gist extension for UUID compatibility.
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Video
CodeHead·26w
10 Concepts EVERY Backend Dev Should Know
Covers 10 fundamental backend development concepts including authentication vs authorization, rate limiting, database indexes, ACID transactions, caching strategies, message queues, load balancing, CAP theorem, reverse proxies, and CDNs. Explains how each concept solves real-world problems like security, performance, scalability, and reliability in production systems.
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Article
Marc Brooker·26w
Why Strong Consistency?
Eventual consistency in database architectures creates significant challenges for both application developers and end users. Common issues include race conditions where newly created resources appear to not exist, complex retry logic requirements, and limitations on read replica effectiveness for read-modify-write operations. Aurora DSQL addresses these problems by providing strongly consistent reads across all replicas while maintaining read scalability, eliminating the need for applications to handle replication lag and routing complexity.
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Article
Atomic Spin·28w
I Used a Full Stack Workflow to Organize a Complex Storyboard
A developer shares how they built a custom database-backed API to organize a complex creative writing project. The solution uses SQL for data storage, .NET for the API layer with a repository-service-controller pattern, Docker for database initialization, and OpenAPI Generator to create an NPM package for frontend integration. The project demonstrates applying professional full-stack development patterns to solve personal organizational challenges, taking approximately 30 hours from conception to completion.
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Article
Jacob’s Tech Tavern·28w
The Great Connection Pool Meltdown
Tuist's caching server experienced cascading failures when their cloud provider's network issues caused connection pool exhaustion. Thousands of failed S3 requests queued up, consuming memory until the server crashed repeatedly. The team implemented fail-fast queue configurations and migrated to a new provider (Render.com), resolving the stability issues. Key lessons include the importance of monitoring, trusting initial diagnoses, and designing systems that gracefully handle failures rather than cascading them.
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Article
Metadata·27w
Disaggregated Database Management Systems
Explores how cloud trends are reshaping database architecture through disaggregation—separating compute, storage, and memory into independently scalable components. Examines three case studies: Google AlloyDB (PostgreSQL with compute-storage separation and HTAP support), Rockset (real-time analytics using the Aggregator-Leaf-Tailer pattern), and Nova-LSM (LSM-based storage with immutable SSTs in object stores). Discusses emerging hardware disaggregation including RDMA-based memory systems, CXL coherent memory fabrics, and DPU-based approaches. Highlights open challenges around automatic workload-driven assembly, co-design across fabrics, correctness verification, and adaptive reconfiguration.
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The New Stack·28w
Moving From C++ to Rust? Clickhouse Has Some Advice
ClickHouse, a 1.5 million line C++ analytics database, shares lessons from their incremental migration to Rust. Rather than a full rewrite, the team integrated Rust modules for specific features like BLAKE3 hashing and Delta Lake support. Key challenges included managing reproducible builds, handling 672 additional Rust dependencies, writing C++/Rust interop wrappers, and dealing with excessive panic behavior in Rust libraries. While Rust offers memory and thread safety advantages, combining it with C++ introduces complexity around build systems, sanitization, and cross-compilation. The team now accepts Rust contributions but has decided against a complete rewrite.
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DuckDB·27w
Announcing DuckDB 1.4.2 LTS
DuckDB 1.4.2 LTS is now available with critical security fixes for database encryption vulnerabilities, new Iceberg extension support for insert/update/delete operations, enhanced logging and profiling capabilities including HTTP request timing, and Vortex file format support. The release also includes performance optimizations for WAL index operations and database detachment, plus fixes for crashes, incorrect results, and storage issues.
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The Verdict·28w
Pretty cool find - Conar, an AI that writes and optimizes SQL for you
Conar is an open-source AI tool that converts natural language queries into optimized SQL statements. It currently supports PostgreSQL with MySQL and MongoDB support planned. The tool features end-to-end encryption for credentials and queries, and allows users to select their preferred AI model. It aims to reduce the time developers spend writing repetitive SQL queries.
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Article
PostgreSQL·27w
PostgreSQL 18.1, 17.7, 16.11, 15.15, 14.20, and 13.23 Released!
PostgreSQL has released security updates across all supported versions (18.1, 17.7, 16.11, 15.15, 14.20, and 13.23), addressing two security vulnerabilities and over 50 bugs. The first vulnerability allows unauthorized denial of service through CREATE STATISTICS commands, while the second involves integer wraparound in libpq that can cause memory corruption. PostgreSQL 13 reaches end-of-life with this final release, and users should plan upgrades to supported versions.
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selfh.st·27w
Self-Host Weekly #145: Agentic
A weekly newsletter covering self-hosting news and tools. Highlights include commentary on recent cloud service outages, Microsoft's announcement of Windows becoming an 'agentic OS', and research on why people choose to self-host. Features Postgresus, an automated PostgreSQL backup platform with web interface, scheduling, multiple storage destinations, and Docker deployment support.
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