Open-source research and development in distributed systems. Click to read Applied Computing Research Labs, by drmorr, a Substack publication.

Cloudflare Basin is built on Apache Iceberg and R2 Object Storage. With general availability, developers can ingest, manage, and query large datasets at scale without paying data egress fees.

6.29K Posts, 184 Following, 302 Followers · Optimizer. Photographer. In disbelief that computers actually work. Accidentally writing a role-playing game. (he/him)

This week we present the first of two episodes on dynamic memory allocation.  We were going to talk about garbage collection, but realized we should probably discuss allocators first.  Turns...

Weird data needs weird databases.

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This episode started with the question: who first had the idea to connect computers together to make a network?  We explore JCR Licklider's ideas about an  "Intergalactic Network", some of t...

Scott’s foreword: Cynthia Dwork is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, and a pioneer in the fields of differential privacy and algorithmic fairness. On my recent travels to…

Today, we are going to talk about estimating filter selectivity and how to fail at it. Two queries are similar enough that we will analyse them together: Q12 and Q14.

In this episode we discuss a couple of recent papers on just-in-time development and agentic systems and how we think they suggest trends that will affect software development for years to come. ...

For the 100th episode of Picture Me Coding we talk about numbers.  Mike talks about his favorite numbers, Erik talks about his favorite ports, and we discuss the surprising phenomenon of Benford's Law...

The inside story of Lean, a computer program that answers the age-old question: How do you know if something is true?

This week we were joined by our friend Doug Burke, who runs a company and has been working on his "digital life workout partner", a voice-activated LLM tool. Doug's story is interesting because he doe...

In this episode we invite back our friend Bob Farzin to discuss our personal experiences with using teams of agents to write software, and we try to parse out the experiences we're seeing on the inter...

In this episode we attempt to explain query optimization and where it came from.  In particular we discuss Patricia Selinger's 1979 SIGMOD paper Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Man...

One of many pages of prime number curiosities and trivia. This page discusses 8647 Come explore a new prime today!

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Some recent articles about research on hash tables made us realize we probably didn't know enough about hash tables, one of the fundamental data structures in the biz.  We talk about the history ...

In spite of how it sounds this was usually a pretty cool outcome (and it typically only happened when people liked something I'd written). It felt like the work was taking flight: it had become independent of me and whatever I'd been thinking about when I wrote it.

We give a report of our experiences at the 23rd version of the Southern California Linux Expo (Scale 23x) in Pasadena.  Erik was a volunteer in the network group this year, so we have some behind...

Cray Customer Service – Memories (1979 to 2014) a personal memoir by Charles “Charlie” Clark I have seen lots of articles on Cray Supercomputers, their design. development, uses and ins…

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This month we read Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, which won the Hugo for best novel in 1994 and definitely meets the technical definition of "a novel." DM: Lori Don't forget we're still running a...

In this episode we're joined again by Amy Salley, cohost of the Hugo, Girl! podcast, to help us discuss the Murderbot series of books by Martha Wells.  We discuss our favorite characters and plot...

Apache Iceberg was built for batch analytics — but operational data changes continuously. Learn how Materialize streams live, transactionally consistent data into Iceberg without the memory and latenc...