Phil Eaton is a staff engineer working on Postgres and software internals, sharing insights on databases, systems engineering, and life deep in the software stack.
169 articles from this blog
A senior developer advises a frontend developer on transitioning into database development, covering learning paths, career strategies, and internal role transfers.
An article encouraging software developers to write about their learning experiences, even on non-novel topics, to practice writing, provide diverse perspectives, and cement understanding.
Explores high-performance I/O using io_uring and kqueue, comparing them to blocking I/O and providing a practical TCP server example.
A tutorial on building a basic embedded SQL database in Zig using RocksDB, covering lexing, parsing, storage, and execution.
A tutorial on embedding the RocksDB key-value database in a Zig program, covering basic operations like set, get, and list.
Explains how TigerBeetle, a database written in Zig, operates using only static memory allocation for predictability and performance.
A tutorial on building a minimal distributed key-value database using Hashicorp's Raft library in Go, with a single-file example.
Explains the purpose and advantages of embedded key-value databases like RocksDB and FoundationDB, comparing them to traditional SQL and NoSQL systems.
Article discusses SQLite's limited built-in functions, compares it to other databases, and introduces a Go-based standard library extension.
Strategies for efficiently scheduling Docker containers to integration test 14+ databases in GitHub Actions, improving CI performance.
A tutorial on building a basic jq-like JSON parser in Go, focusing on memory-efficient partial parsing and using Go's profiler for optimization.
A developer shares his one-year journey building open-source data tools without funding, including stats, challenges, and future plans.
A tutorial on building a distributed PostgreSQL proof-of-concept using external libraries for SQL parsing, wire protocol, Raft consensus, and storage.
Benchmark comparison of SQLite in Go using the cgo-based mattn/go-sqlite3 package versus the pure-Go modernc.org/sqlite translation.
Exploring the hidden 'event' variable in HTML onclick attributes and how to access it for form submission handling.
A survey of SQL parser libraries across multiple programming languages, comparing handwritten vs. generated parsers and their handling of basic SELECT queries.
A tutorial on building a basic document database in Go with Lucene-like filters and indexes, inspired by Elasticsearch.
A technical article on optimizing Go's standard JSON encoder for large datasets, achieving up to 55% speed improvements.
A developer documents their journey of implementing a basic SMTP server in Go to receive emails from Gmail, covering DNS setup and firewall configuration.
Explains PostgreSQL wire protocol compatibility and how new databases reuse it for client compatibility, independent of query language.
