Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Tyler F. Cloutier will explain why and how they embedded a MMORPG game engine inside of the @spacetimedb.bsky.social database system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Dr. Marcel Kornacker will present the design & implementation of the Pixeltable multi-modal DBMS based on PostgreSQL. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Thanks to Google BigTable for providing prizes to the top 3 @db.cs.cmu.edu students with the fastest projects in our Database Systems course this semester! They have to implement a buffer pool, B+Tree, query executors, and MVCC. Students are encouraged to profile+benchmark to get better rankings.

This email showed up two weeks ago. It is super sketchy so I didn't respond. They followed again but I'm not meeting them. Andy and the police don't mix. 👑 Remember Rule #9 from Biggie's Ten Crack Commandments: If you aren't being arrested, stay away from police youtu.be/ot9NT9W0Fog

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Filip Obradovic will present the wild architecture of TonicDB. It runs directly on hardware without an OS via a shim layer / unikernel. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Hari Krishna Sunder will present the architecture of the @yugabytedb.bsky.social distributed DBMS based on Postgres. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Simon Eskildsen will present the architecture of the @turbopuffer.bsky.social search engine. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Adam Prout will present the architecture of Microsoft Azure HorizonDB database service based on PostgreSQL. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Marek Galovic will present the TopK document + vector search engine system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Marc Brooker (@marcbrooker.bsky.social) will present the architecture of Amazon's Aurora DSQL Postgres-compatible serverless OLTP DBMS. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Today's Postgres vs. World Seminar Speaker: Tyler Akidau + Adam Symanski will present the architecture of @redpanda.com's Oxla database system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/pg-vs...

Spring 2026 Seminar Series: PostgreSQL vs. The World db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/spr... First talk on Mon Feb 2nd @ 4:30pm EST. We will alternate between a speaker from either a Postgres DBMS or a non-Postgres DBMS. Open to the public over Zoom. All videos available on YouTube afterwards.

Thanks to Bohan Zhang for hosting me at OpenAI yesterday. Lots of @db.cs.cmu.edu alum are thriving there. Plus the Rockset squad rolled up. It was the nicest tech office I've visited in my life. It was like a classy lawfirm but with an insane number of ex-FBI bouncers at the front entrance.

Congratulations to the 2026 CIDR prize awardees! Tianyu Li → Gong Show Winner Fuheng Zhao → Database Quiz Winner They each received a rare signed print of "The Birth of the Database Messiah" (estimated insurance value $12,000).

I recently came across this database system in my travels: medium.com/@sschepis/i-... The title immediately raises my BS alarms. They claim to "teleport data" via "quantum mechanical principles".

I don't want to cook such an early stage company but I think these people are trying to sell MMAP as a service?!? No technical details except it appears to be a MMAP buffer pool. I also don't know why their system is "fully ACID" but RocksDB is not? ryjoxdemo.com/solutions/ed...

At least this scam company remembered to sanitize their database inputs before sending out their spam...

I've posted my latest recap of the world of databases: www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/... All the hot topics from the last year: • More Postgres action! • MCP for everyone! • MongoDB gets litigious with FerretDB! • File formats! • Market movements! • The richest person in the history of the world!

Congratulations to the #1 ranked @db.cs.cmu.edu PhD student Wan Shen Lim (@wslim.bsky.social) for successfully passing his doctoral defense. Wan has been working on hard AF database research with me for the last *nine* years at CMU (undergrad+grad). He also hates chickens.

in a tiny job update: I'm taking over as co-director of CMU's parallel data lab (PDL). in a bad news update: I just used the phrase "align with CMU's brand strategy" unironically in an email to the administration. might need an intervention...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jark Wu from AlibabaCloud will present an overview of Apache Fluss. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Do you like databases? Do you want to hear two database professors rant about them? Do you need one of those professors to have a Turing Award for databases? If yes, then join Mike Stonebraker and I next Wed Dec 10 @ 1:00pm EST for database hot takes: www.dbos.dev/webcast-2025...

There is still time to register for CIDR 2026 in Santa Cruz! If you need a roommate for the conference, there is also a spreadsheet you can use to find someone! www.cidrdb.org/cidr2026/reg...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Prashant Singh from Snowflake will present the Apache Polaris re-implementation of the Iceberg REST catalog API. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jeremy Taylor (@refset.bsky.social) will present the architecture of the XTDB (@xtdb.com) time-traveling database system. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Benjamin Wagner🇩🇪 will present @firebolthq.bsky.social's native support for low-latency queries on Apache Iceberg tables. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Cheng Chen will present how @mooncakelabs.bsky.social extends PostgreSQL to support Apache Iceberg. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Great idea to compare plans across different systems using rows processed. A good yardstick, but slower sort-based plans from Postgres + MSSQL process fewer rows than faster hash-based plans from DuckDB. Postgres rows scanned also seem underreported. Nice to see some competition with ClickBench.

New database leaderboard from Yellowbrick ranks the quality of DBMS optimizer estimates and plans. They only evaluate TPC-H for now and report results for Postgres + DuckDB + MSSQL: sql-arena.com/components/p... Repo: github.com/sql-arena/db... LinkedIn Group: www.linkedin.com/groups/15775...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Ryan Johnson (CMU PhD'10) will present @deltalakeoss.bsky.social's internal architecture and how it supports multi-statement transactions. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Joyo Victor will present @singlestore.com's "Bottle Service" meta-data system that supports database branching, change-data-capture, and Apache Iceberg. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Lots of database action this week. Yes, I have a new start-up @sydht.ai with my PhD students @wslim.bsky.social + @17zhangw.bsky.social using LLMs to optimize almost everything in PostgreSQL. @datadictum.bsky.social posted a new article on our approach: www.theregister.com/2025/10/22/c...

Day 2 of #P99CONF is here! The #ScyllaDB Lounge opens at 8:00 am PST, and then we get things started with keynotes from @dorlaor.bsky.social and @andypavlo.bsky.social. Don't forget that all registrants receive Instant Access to the sessions once the conference ends. www.p99conf.io?latest_sfdc_...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Ian Cook (@ian.columnar.tech) will present @columnar.tech's work on Apache Arrow's database connectivity API (ADBC). ADBC is available in modern DBMSs. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Will Manning (@willmanning.com) will present @spiraldb.com's Vortex file format. Vortex is now a @linuxfoundation.org project. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

BTW if anyone wants a good intro to database storage / Log structured storage (aka LSM trees) @db.cs.cmu.edu lecture this fall is a good one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_sT...

MMAP is incredibly fast when the dataset fits in memory, but it slows to a crawl when it doesn't, especially if the workload is mostly random point lookups. Speaking as someone who built an MMAP-based key-value store before :) Obligatory paper from @andypavlo.bsky.social db.cs.cmu.edu/mmap-cidr2022/

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Jordan Tigani (@jrdntgn.bsky.social) will present how @motherduck.com supports modern workloads with DuckLake. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Our SIGMOD paper with our friends at Tsinghua + @wesmckinney.com + @pateljm.bsky.social on creating a next generation open-source data file format is out. F3 is a future-proof file format avoids the mistakes of Parquet. 📄 Paper: db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2025/... 📁 Code: github.com/future-file-...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Vinoth Chandar will present the internals of Apache Hudi and his work at Onehouse. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Today's Future Data Systems Seminar Speaker: Russell Spitzer will present the internals of Apache Iceberg's query planner and execution engine. Zoom talk open to public at 4:30pm ET. YouTube video available after: db.cs.cmu.edu/events/futur...

Next week is the start of @db.cs.cmu.edu's latest seminar series: Future Data Systems @samarchdb.bsky.social and I are hosting speakers from leading systems in the datalake / lakehouse space. Mondays @ 4:30pm ET via Zoom. Open to the public. Videos posted to YouTube: db.cs.cmu.edu/seminars/fal...

I don't know what to say. You dream about it for so long and then when it finally happens you're in shock. I'm so proud of you Larry. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

What if a database could be your game engine? During parental leave @lukasvogel.bsky.social built DOOMQL: A multiplayer DOOM-like where everything (rendering, game loop, state) runs in pure SQL on CedarDB. It's fast, ridiculous, and surprisingly elegant. Full write-up: cedardb.com/blog/doomql

Today is the new semester for @db.cs.cmu.edu's Intro to Database Systems! We're going harder into material than before. More challenging projects but you can use LLMs to help. We also have 10min talks each Wed from leading DB companies: 15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2025

Launching my Programming Language Pragmatics talks! These short, accessible talks cover the material in the textbook, the 5th edition of which I wrote with Michael L. Scott. The first one introduces the topic and talks about why we study programming languages! www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwL0...

The report of my death was an exaggeration. I am still alive and will be in SFO this week to speak about using LLMs to automatically tune databases. Wed Aug 6th @ 5:30pm at Databricks MTV: lu.ma/ha0dc4nj

Attention, South Bay folk! We have The Databaseologist, @andypavlo.bsky.social, giving a talk in the bay on August 6th. Come join us for a great time in hearing: ChatGPT Ain’t Got $%@& On Me! The Future of Automated Database Tuning Register now! https://lu.ma/ha0dc4nj

At last @abigalekim.bsky.social's paper is out! Its the most complete eval of DB extensions/plugins ever. We analyze PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, DuckDB, Redis. TLDR: Postgres extns ecosystem is fraught with footguns. Other DBMSs have fewer extns but less problems. DuckDB has cleanest API.

People asked for the rest of the lecture videos for CMU-DB's optimizer course (15799.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2025). Unfortunately I got super sick and was in the hospital for 4 weeks. Thankfully @wslim.bsky.social + Jignesh taught the remaining lectures, but we didn't record those classes.