Whatever your transactional database is, help me understand your use of it. This survey is run by @theconsensusdev, independent of any database or vendor. Repost or pass along to industry peers for broader representation forms.gle/fqjQsezWsztx...

The Consensus Weekly is out, free to read as always, which features interesting internships, job openings, and funding news in software infrastructure, as well as systems developers looking for work. Up first are all new internships this past week. theconsensus.dev/n/2026/05/09...

My article on re-checking (and automating) Hermitage results for modern MySQL and MariaDB is out of paywall. MariaDB has made great progress toward standard definitions of transaction isolation, though it has some outstanding bug reports from Jepsen and Percona. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/05/02...

Kumar Ujjawal, Apache DataFusion committer and Turso contributor, takes us behind the scenes to understand affinity and type coercion in SQLite, which differs from many other major databases, in a new article for The Consensus. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/05/06...

Donate $30 to an educational non-profit or open-source project and I'll credit you $30 toward The Consensus Standard subscription. I'm excited to support these organizations with you! theconsensus.dev/subscribe.html

The Consensus Weekly went out yesterday which features internships, interesting jobs in software engineering, and funding news in software infrastructure. Here are all new tracked internships at Replit, Atomic Semi, SiFive, etc. No subscription needed, go do interesting things!

Martin Kleppmann's Hermitage project categorizes the behavior of transaction isolation levels in major SQL databases, but many results haven't been updated in over a decade. And MariaDB has diverged significantly from MySQL in behavior since then. Let's see what's changed!

I chatted with Branimir Lambov from IBM on a decade of contributing to Cassandra, including his recent work to replace the Skiplist in Cassandra's LSM tree with a Trie. (no paywall) theconsensus.dev/p/2026/04/26...

jemalloc had a tumultuous last few years but this didn't actually cause any projects who had been using it to move off. I wrote about what happened and I cataloged the projects still using jemalloc. (paywall has expired) theconsensus.dev/p/2026/04/16...

I pay experienced developers a small fee to write for The Consensus. theconsensus.dev/contribute.h...

The Consensus Weekly just went out. Covering funding news; IC, management, and internship job openings; and a new section on experienced developers looking for work. This is just a snapshot of over 600 job openings and over 80 funding announcements in the last three months.

jemalloc is a popular malloc implementation. By simply installing a package and setting an environment variable you might get magical performance gains without editing a line of code. But development stalled. So who's using it today? Quite a few major projects. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/04/16...

> Normal Computing 👀👀

The Consensus Weekly just went out. New featured jobs, articles, and funding announcements in your inbox. theconsensus.dev/weekly.html

DataFusion 53 came out last week. I took a look at the individuals and companies who committed the most. (paywall has expired) theconsensus.dev/p/2026/04/03...

The Consensus Standard, March 2026 is now out. The monthly newsletter recapping our articles as well as happenings (releases, funding, jobs) in software infrastructure.

With 480 commits contributed by at least 120 developers from at least 52 companies, these are the individuals and companies who contributed the most to DataFusion 53 released earlier this week. Two developers have publicly indicated they're looking for work. Pick them up if they're still open!

Galera is a multi-master database run on top of MariaDB that Kyle Kingsbury's Jepsen recently reported on. We attempt to reproduce some of his findings with a local three-node cluster. (Paywall has expired, article is now available for all.) theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/29...

Riffing on the recent Jepsen report, I took a look at MariaDB's open-source multi-master clustering database, Galera. I was impressed both by the work MariaDB has done to make REPEATABLE READ more in line with the literature and also with Galera itself. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/29...

If I you like deep technical content, I highly recommend subscribing to The Consensus, or taking a stab at writing. Or both!

Two interesting things related to publishing this: 1) Payments for articles were bumped from $100 per article to $200 per article. 2) Authors are now welcome not just from the US but from anywhere in the world (that Remote dot com allows me to pay).

Kir Shatrov, Principal Engineer at Shopify, writes for The Consensus about a technique for tracking the (MySQL) database cost of every API call. Paywall has expired, enjoy! theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/20...

We've got a new newsletter! Want to learn about new articles on The Consensus, and new job postings and upcoming events? Join The Consensus Weekly for free. theconsensus.dev/weekly.html

Your weekly jobs-in-infrastructure roundup (14 new). Positions at companies like Tailscale, XBOW, Jane Street, and well-funded early stage startups like Native Security (Tel Aviv), Tracebit (London), Deeptune (New York), and Corridor AI (San Francisco). theconsensus.dev/jobs.html

In a new article, Kir Shatrov shares a technique for safely breaking down the (MySQL) database cost of each downstream service's API calls by having the database return cost information so that the downstream service can log it. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/20...

Somtochi is incredibly smart and fun to work with!

In this month's Developer Spotlight, I spoke with Somtochi Onyekwere from Fly for The Consensus. She's contributed to Kubernetes itself, Kubernetes projects at Weaveworks, and now works on distributed databases at Fly. There is no paywall, I hope you enjoy hearing from her!

Mojo is a new proprietary systems language, often referred to as a superset of Python. It requires a non-trivial amount of massaging before it can run what looks like Python code. But the direction is promising. (Paywall has expired, article is available for all to read.)

20 new job openings just dropped. Compelling IC and management positions with well-funded data, security, and AI companies in Boston, San Francisco, San Jose, France, Bengaluru, Tel Aviv, globally remote, and more.

jq's error messages can be confusing, but gradual typing makes these errors more scrutable. Written by @keles.bsky.social. (Paywall has expired, article is available for all to read.) theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/06...

I've wanted to look at Mojo for quite some time. It is definitely not yet a superset of Python. But with that seeming to be a goal and with the standard library being open-source there is a very clear area for you to go and contribute to a well-funded major programming language.

Source-available projects and their AI contribution policies (paywall has expired, article is now available for all to read) theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/02...

In a new article for The Consensus, @keles.bsky.social discusses the challenge of making sense of error messages in jq, and how jq's error message can be made more useful with gradual typing. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/06...

The very first of The Consensus Standard just went out. This is a monthly newsletter for folks subscribing at the Standard Subscription tier. A collection of 1) articles written for The Consensus, 2) interesting jobs, 3) funding announcements, and 4) external articles I enjoyed.

New batch of jobs dropped. These job postings are not sponsored (if they ever are, they will be labeled). They're simply interesting-looking opportunities related to software infrastructure, pulled from around the internet. theconsensus.dev/jobs.html

We - like many other technical teams - are hungry for the market for trusted, neutral, technical advice, but it's hard to find. The big analyst firms aren't sufficiently forward-thinking, and their publications are rarely detailed enough, geared towards managers rather than practitioners.

I surveyed 112 major source-available projects to understand their AI contribution policy and whether or not they have actually accepted explicitly-labeled AI contributions. Only 4 projects banned AI completely: Zig, NetBSD, GIMP, and qemu. 70 already have AI-assisted commits.

We have pgvector at home (paywall has expired, article is now available for all to read) theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/22...

I spoke with Kosta Tarasov who contributes to DataFusion and arrow-rs in his free time. This article is not paywalled, read it now. A big goal of The Consensus is to highlight and celebrate the work of open source contributors, both newcomers and long-time contributors.

I started a software research company notes.eatonphil.com/2026-02-25-i...

You're probably right to pick a modern extension to support vector similarity search in Postgres. But did you know Postgres already has one built in? I took a look at the cube extension in Postgres, pgvector, and model2vec for some impressively fast embeddings generation.

I wanted to understand how to generate my own vector embeddings and understand semantic search in general without external services. It became a significant rabbit hole. I wrote a post on some of what I learned. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/15...

VillageSQL came out of stealth this week, prompting me to understand the state of plugins and vector indexes in forks and rewrites of MySQL. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/08...

If you've run seaweedfs, versity, juicefs, beegfs, or rustfs—permissively-licensed s3-compatible storage systems— and are open to chatting about your experience, I'd like to chat with you for The Consensus.

One thing I'm excited about with The Consensus is giving you a hub to find interesting 1) jobs and 2) events going on in systems programming.

I wrote a short article about the major companies behind the most recent release of Postgres. Also mentioned interesting commits by smaller contributors, including a first-time contributor who fixed a bug involving ctid scans that might have dated back to 1999. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/02...