I got Claude to help with a blog index refresh, surfacing about 1.5 years of posts to the front page that had been languishing: github.com/frankmcsherr.... It unintentionally included one unfinished post that I'll now have to get sorted out. :D

Made a thing: Pollard is a MCP server for analyzing Firefox performance profiles. crates.io/crates/pollard

We now have datatoad's mdbook section on joins. It covers the planning of joins of abstract directed relations, and their execution by a mix of binary and worst-case optimal join stages. It's pretty tight, but I don't think it's missing much except examples. www.frankmcsherry.org/datatoad/cha...

As part of an attempt to get Claude to help me communicate better, we have .. a Claude-assisted mdbook for datatoad: www.frankmcsherry.org/datatoad/int... Still a work in progress, but it came together much faster with help.

Totally innocent question: I've found Claude has made me rather productive, at a rate that outpaces what I can write about solo. I'm trying to figure out if there is value/space for an intentionally "slop" line of posts that explains work that has been done, minus the alleged charm and certain salt.

A very nice post out of @materialize.com about "representation types" which remove non-structural distinctions between types as they approach the dataflow rendering layer, unlocking physical optimizations across logically distinct types: materialize.com/blog/no-clas...

Fun experiment du jour: can Claude write stable matching in differential dataflow using a simplified language that hides any of details of DD. Yes, it turns out! Correct out of the box, and with a bit of nudging it got something better than I have written:

With Claude, and a few lines of Rust, you can add a live timely dataflow visualizer to your programs, giving you visibility into where the time goes, and soon (surely) arrangement record counts as well!

A new blog post about accelerating timely dataflow by 100x. Part of the story is how timely is able to do this, and .. seemingly .. other stream processor are not. It comes down to a fundamentally different approach to tracking time: globally rather than locally. github.com/frankmcsherr...

I used Claude for the first time this month, having only ever used copilot before (and .. stopped immediately afterwards). It turns out .. I am maybe obsolete? We improved `columnar` together, and each wrote a post about it. (linked within my post).

A recent post by @dov.dev about Materialize's new Iceberg sink, and generally about connecting live operational data to analytics stores. Some interesting detail about (overcome) streaming-batch friction, and turning pristine CDC streams into .. Iceberg! materialize.com/blog/making-...

Worlds collide: pretty sure someone at the MTA plays FFXIV:

I wrote a tiny vectorized interpreter last night, and .. thought I'd write up a post describing it. Nothing earth shattering here, but if you haven't seen one of these before it could be interesting! Probably easier to read than the J Incunabulum, but also less .. wow. github.com/frankmcsherr...

We have a recent @materialize.com post from Jan Teske about how MZ's self-correcting materialized views work. It's imo a very cool thing that unpacks some of the magic about how this could possibly work as the underlying system evolves. materialize.com/blog/self-co...

I wrote a bit about the "demand transform" for Datalog (and other similar languages): github.com/frankmcsherr... The idea of the transform is that rather than eagerly produce all the data you might ever need, you can start from the seed crystals of concrete values and data that might yield output.

If anyone ever told you Datalog is elegant, they probably haven't used datatoad yet. The evenness condition is an interesting example of relation-rather-than-function, though!

I went through and validated the output counts (numbers of facts) for most of the datatoad outputs. Some were hard to validate because datatoad sneaked in on my laptop but the other systems paged too hard, but everything seems correct. github.com/frankmcsherr...

I put up a new post about work that I am perhaps irrationally excited about: the combination of worst-case optimal joins with relational programming. github.com/frankmcsherr... The high-order bits are that relational programming is very neat, and it fits great with modern (WCO) relational joins.

I wrote a post evaluating datatoad using the framework from the recent FlowLog paper: github.com/frankmcsherr.... It turns out it does well in some cases, worse in others, and has already improved by having other folks shine a light on its limitations by choosing problems and datasets I ignored!

I wrote about datatoad as a "worst-case optimal Datalog", which .. perhaps doesn't typecheck. A previous result on streaming worst-case optimal joins seems to connect, and swapping "streaming" for "iterative" gives something that may be syntactically correct catnip. github.com/frankmcsherr...

Getting crisper; now within ~1s (14.8s v 13.7s) of my hand-optimized plan that uses only binary joins, but without any plan hints. Erm, mostly. Hoping to bypass it, as a win for WCO joins. :D

I wrote a little bit about worst-case optimal joins in datatoad, support for which has just landed although there is a bit of tidying still to do before they are as crisp as the non-wco joins. github.com/frankmcsherr...

A short note on how one can perform joins of sums by accumulating at a point halfway through the join. Neither the input nor the output of the join, but smaller intermediate terms that show up when you peer closer at what a join does internally. github.com/frankmcsherr...

I wrote a bit about datatoad going "full columnar". All operations are now columnar; no rows are ever formed; everything is column-at-a-time. github.com/frankmcsherr... A bunch of interesting (to me) algorithms, and also some performance regressions, but then clawing back. I learned things!

Looking forward to this!

New from Materialize: Cloud M.1 Clusters Run 3x larger workloads with the same low latency and predictable performance—thanks to intelligent data spilling and expanded capacity. Learn more: bit.ly/3L12oH2

Datatoad check-in: this time including some recent progress on columnar joins (good news: faster). Though, it also tries to roll up a bit of the sprawl of content I've scribbled, which increasingly feels like it needs some more careful curation to be helpful. github.com/frankmcsherr...

Good news on the Datalog front: v1 of "columnar joins" seem to work, and resulted in a 20% improvement (from 9.5s to 7.5s, for the joins of a reference workload). Still more gains from tightening it up, and potentially from columnar sorting, but I'll take a swing at writing things up tomorrow!

What a difference an allocator makes! This is the same Rust program first using the system allocator, and then using mimalloc. About 100MB of working set in both cases, just .. apparently it pilots the system allocator to some horrible behavior. Obviously going to start using mimalloc from now on.

Welcome Frank McSherry @frankmcsherry.bsky.social to Sync Conf 2025. Pioneer of sync technology, inventor of Differential Dataflow, and founder of @materialize.com, Frank will trace the evolution of sync and stream processing.

Highlighting some of my team's recent work: We've changed Materialize to use swap instead of memory-mapped files, with nice performance and efficiency improvements.

We’ve released a major improvement to our memory spilling infrastructure: Materialize now uses swap to scale SQL workloads beyond RAM. ✅ Faster hydration ✅ Efficient memory utilization ✅ Bigger workloads supported Full post from antiguru.bsky.social → bit.ly/46EF2iJ

Very excited to bring some column-orientation to timely and differential. At least, removing baked in row-orientation in timely, and actual column-orientation in differential, with a bunch of cool learnings from the datatoad work. I hope. We'll see. :D

We just released Timely Dataflow 0.24! Here are some exciting changes from @frankmcsherry.bsky.social and myself. The container abstractions got a complete rework, and we introduce a new pattern to distribute data. Details below. github.com/TimelyDatafl...

I have a trip coming up, and I'm hoping to find some content to read about the implementations of (ideally interpreted) array languages. I'm on an interpreter kick, and armed with a bunch of column-oriented libraries. Any tips, drop a reply!

I wrote a bit about datatoad's columnar logic for relational operators. At least, for union, intersection, antijoins, and semijoins. It turns out the joins are all easy; it's projection that is hard, of all things. Go figure. github.com/frankmcsherr...

Notion's new offline support is based on our rich text CRDT research x.com/ivanhzhao/st...

If you are in SF in November, I'll be speaking at syncconf.dev (@syncconf.bsky.social)! It's an excellent confluence of all things up-to-data. Architectures like MZ at the backend, connected via sync engines, and front ends that don't waste anyone's time waiting on database queries.

In Datalog news: I had given up on getting (compiled) datafrog numbers for the "alias analysis" problem, because it is tedious to write. But thanks to an anonymous benefactor, it was coded up and we can now make a comparison between compiled datafrog and interpreted datatoad, on the same problem!

I wrote about the projects done at Materialize’s recent hackathon. Many very cool projects, and also one that I worked on; take a read! materialize.com/blog/spring_...

A neat new Materialize post from our QA department on speeding up CI. materialize.com/blog/speedin...

Datalog weekend: we graduate to queries with cyclic rules, non-binary relations, and generally more interesting behavior. In particular, we're going to compare ourselves against interpreted Soufflé; a standard reference point! How does interpreted datatoad compare? github.com/frankmcsherr...

We have a new @materialize.com post up, this time about pushing selection predicates into our persistence layer. Materialize hybridizes batch and streaming computation (it does both, regularly), and draws on the best optimizations of each (in this case, CDWs). materialize.com/blog/how-fil...

Nice that the Bluesky firehose is now becoming a live dataset on which to demo streaming databases

We have a weekend Datalog update: datatoad now comes with tries! I took the long route to get here, and have a bit of other work in the pipeline as part of all this. But I'm happy to report that memory went down by another 2x (expected), and runtime went down by ~1.6x. github.com/frankmcsherr...

We have a new blog post up at @materialize.com about analyzing the Bluesky firehose (Jetstream, really) through Materialize. You can grab a copy of the community edition of MZ and follow along, or invent your own ways of looking at the data, live! materialize.com/blog/analyzi...

I had a great time at Kris's workshop in May! Lots of inspiring talks and discussions. He has posted a mega-video of all the recorded talks, I highly recommend checking some of them out if you're into Datalog, logic programming, or incrementalization. There is even some e-graph stuff in there!

Folks! The workshop at Minnowbrook that prompted the datatoad work has put up the videos from the talk. NINE HOURS! Of logic programming content! I liked the talks; they are chaptered; you can see @mwillsey.com talk about e-graphs; why haven't you clicked yet??? www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ec9...

Word is getting around.

I refreshed a blog post draft on streaming the Bluesky firehose through @materialize.com. Some experience tidied up the examples, made things a bit more efficient, and told a different story (now with less cloture). More in the near future, as we put a front end on it! github.com/frankmcsherr...