Blog Columns
Six thematic columns, each with its own dedicated RSS feed.
Database Guru
75posts
Database news, industry surveys, architecture, and best practices.
Cloud-Exiter
66posts
Cloud economics, repatriation, and building sovereign infrastructure.
Postgres Mage
128posts
PostgreSQL ecosystem, internals, extensions, and production tuning.
AI Agent Explorer
98posts
Practical engineering with coding agents, LLMs, AI4DB, and DB4AI.
Travel Notes
12posts
Trips, hikes, landscapes, and field notes across mountains and seas.
Miscellaneous
41posts
Essays, reflections, and personal writing inside and outside of tech.
A $500 ChatGPT Plan? Why the $200 Pro Tier May Become a Grandfathered Bargain
ChatGPT Pro Max is priced at $500 a month, but the real question is the usage multiplier: 50× keeps the wholesale discount alive, while 25× or 20× signals shrinking subsidies—and turns the existing …
PostgreSQL 19 Beta 4: Five Major Features Reverted
PostgreSQL 19 Beta 4 reverted five major features at once: SQL/PGQ property graph queries, online data checksums, temporal UPDATE and DELETE, partition merge and split, and DDL reconstruction …
Why Established Companies May Never Become AI-Native
What is happening is not transformation, but new species replacing old ones. Incentives and structure keep established companies from capturing AI's gains. AI-native companies will grow from scratch, …
Codex Edited My Video in One Shot for About 8 Yuan
I gave Codex three panel recordings and a casually dictated prompt. Forty-eight minutes later, it delivered a finished edit with subtitles, at an estimated amortized subscription cost of about 8 yuan. …
The Application Layer Is Collapsing: The Moat Moves to the Database
As agents take over software interfaces and execution logic, where does the application layer go? Future software will consist of a lasting system of record and harnesses that are continually replaced …
Thirty-Three
Turning 33, I look back on what may have been my most enjoyable year yet: one person, a team of agents, Pigsty, PostgreSQL's Chinese ecosystem, Silo—and, somehow, work-life balance.
The Pirate Game, and Why Society Needs “Madmen”
The pirate game, the people who flip the table, and the trap the decent ones are stuck in. A game theory of flipping the table: why the people who refuse to let things go are the load-bearing beam …
PostgreSQL's Chinese Translations Went Seven Years Untended. I Fixed Them in Seven Days.
Never set your PostgreSQL locale to zh_CN: that old rule expires with PostgreSQL 19. After seven years of neglect nearly cost Chinese its place in the release, I rebuilt the message catalogs in seven …
Zhipu, Why Is ZCode Packaging and Uploading My Repo?
I had just praised GLM 5.3 when ZCode's silent repository uploads came to light. Then I found the same mechanism on my own machine.
MinIO Nuked Its Docker Hub Repos—Your Object Storage Doesn't Have to Go Down With It
On September 11, MinIO deleted the minio/minio and minio/mc repositories from Docker Hub outright, finishing its walk out the door. Over the past month or so I put two mutually adversarial AI agents …
The Mouthless Model: AI's OLTP Moment
Jev doesn't talk. It looks at a state, hands you a probability for every option, returns in milliseconds, and charges nothing for output. What it fills in is the OLTP path AI never had—the model only …
RustFS 1.0 GA: Don't Turn Into MinIO
Five days after MinIO vanished from Docker Hub, RustFS shipped 1.0 GA. I tested the binary-swap migration: unencrypted data survives a full stop-and-swap, and you can even roll back — but there is no …
An Ice Cream Agenda
How does a verdict of “tastes awful” become a week's public agenda? When someone with the power to set that agenda calls himself “just a consumer,” he conceals more than his power. He also conceals …
5 TB Deleted
A PolarDB for PostgreSQL instance deployed in Docker on a single host lost 5 TB of data—no backups. Watching the recovery unfold, I would rather talk about the value of prevention, and how to make …
Local AI: A Question of Power, Not Price
Anthropic's threat report, OpenAI's soap opera, the closure of the $200 subscription tier, and rising GPU and memory prices—all of this week's events tell the same story.
Chinese PostgreSQL Docs Are Live: All 11 Major Versions
pgsql.cc is live, with Chinese documentation for all 11 PostgreSQL major versions from 10 through 20, a redesigned mirror of the official website, and better full-text search. Kept in sync with …
How Do You Burn Through 10 $200 Codex Subscriptions?
Buying 10 AI subscriptions is easy. The real bottleneck is turning tokens into useful output—and using automation to scale your time, attention, and ability to judge the results.
GPT Astra Launch Giveaway: Free Banked Resets
As Astra began rolling out, Tibo announced one banked reset per day for paid users still waiting for access. I'm stocking up for when Astra arrives.
RAG Isn't Dead. But It's Getting There.
The word RAG is still alive, but chunk-embed-top-k should no longer be the default answer. Look at the material first, then pick the architecture — and PostgreSQL is worth a great deal more than a …
No Tokens? Drop Out. And That's Putting It Politely
A slide from a Nanjing University course said CS students without tokens should drop out immediately, and the Chinese internet split down the middle over it. What the fight is actually about: the …
I Asked Claude to Profile Me and Value My One-Person Company
I asked a neutral Claude with no memory of me to assess PGSTY and estimate what it might be worth.
Documentation-Driven Development: The First Secret to AI Software Engineering
People often ask: how do I ensure quality when AI writes the code? My answer has four parts: documentation-driven development, adversarial review, brute-force testing, and complexity penalties.
Catalog Bullshit: Take the Database Apart, Then Rent a PostgreSQL Table Back to You
Snowflake blames the lakehouse's governance gaps on multiple engines and turns the Catalog into a new billing layer. But the core of an Iceberg Catalog is just a metadata-pointer CAS; the real …
AWS Acquires DuckDB: The Duck Flies into the Amazon Rainforest
AWS bought the people who build the duck and left the duck itself to the foundation.
A $500 ChatGPT Plan? Why the $200 Pro Tier May Become a Grandfathered Bargain
ChatGPT Pro Max is priced at $500 a month, but the real question is the usage multiplier: 50× keeps the wholesale discount alive, while 25× or 20× signals shrinking subsidies—and turns the existing …
PostgreSQL 19 Beta 4: Five Major Features Reverted
PostgreSQL 19 Beta 4 reverted five major features at once: SQL/PGQ property graph queries, online data checksums, temporal UPDATE and DELETE, partition merge and split, and DDL reconstruction …
Why Established Companies May Never Become AI-Native
What is happening is not transformation, but new species replacing old ones. Incentives and structure keep established companies from capturing AI's gains. AI-native companies will grow from scratch, …
Codex Edited My Video in One Shot for About 8 Yuan
I gave Codex three panel recordings and a casually dictated prompt. Forty-eight minutes later, it delivered a finished edit with subtitles, at an estimated amortized subscription cost of about 8 yuan. …
The Application Layer Is Collapsing: The Moat Moves to the Database
As agents take over software interfaces and execution logic, where does the application layer go? Future software will consist of a lasting system of record and harnesses that are continually replaced …
Thirty-Three
Turning 33, I look back on what may have been my most enjoyable year yet: one person, a team of agents, Pigsty, PostgreSQL's Chinese ecosystem, Silo—and, somehow, work-life balance.
The Pirate Game, and Why Society Needs “Madmen”
The pirate game, the people who flip the table, and the trap the decent ones are stuck in. A game theory of flipping the table: why the people who refuse to let things go are the load-bearing beam …
PostgreSQL's Chinese Translations Went Seven Years Untended. I Fixed Them in Seven Days.
Never set your PostgreSQL locale to zh_CN: that old rule expires with PostgreSQL 19. After seven years of neglect nearly cost Chinese its place in the release, I rebuilt the message catalogs in seven …
Zhipu, Why Is ZCode Packaging and Uploading My Repo?
I had just praised GLM 5.3 when ZCode's silent repository uploads came to light. Then I found the same mechanism on my own machine.
MinIO Nuked Its Docker Hub Repos—Your Object Storage Doesn't Have to Go Down With It
On September 11, MinIO deleted the minio/minio and minio/mc repositories from Docker Hub outright, finishing its walk out the door. Over the past month or so I put two mutually adversarial AI agents …
The Mouthless Model: AI's OLTP Moment
Jev doesn't talk. It looks at a state, hands you a probability for every option, returns in milliseconds, and charges nothing for output. What it fills in is the OLTP path AI never had—the model only …
RustFS 1.0 GA: Don't Turn Into MinIO
Five days after MinIO vanished from Docker Hub, RustFS shipped 1.0 GA. I tested the binary-swap migration: unencrypted data survives a full stop-and-swap, and you can even roll back — but there is no …
An Ice Cream Agenda
How does a verdict of “tastes awful” become a week's public agenda? When someone with the power to set that agenda calls himself “just a consumer,” he conceals more than his power. He also conceals …
5 TB Deleted
A PolarDB for PostgreSQL instance deployed in Docker on a single host lost 5 TB of data—no backups. Watching the recovery unfold, I would rather talk about the value of prevention, and how to make …
Local AI: A Question of Power, Not Price
Anthropic's threat report, OpenAI's soap opera, the closure of the $200 subscription tier, and rising GPU and memory prices—all of this week's events tell the same story.
Chinese PostgreSQL Docs Are Live: All 11 Major Versions
pgsql.cc is live, with Chinese documentation for all 11 PostgreSQL major versions from 10 through 20, a redesigned mirror of the official website, and better full-text search. Kept in sync with …
How Do You Burn Through 10 $200 Codex Subscriptions?
Buying 10 AI subscriptions is easy. The real bottleneck is turning tokens into useful output—and using automation to scale your time, attention, and ability to judge the results.
GPT Astra Launch Giveaway: Free Banked Resets
As Astra began rolling out, Tibo announced one banked reset per day for paid users still waiting for access. I'm stocking up for when Astra arrives.
RAG Isn't Dead. But It's Getting There.
The word RAG is still alive, but chunk-embed-top-k should no longer be the default answer. Look at the material first, then pick the architecture — and PostgreSQL is worth a great deal more than a …
No Tokens? Drop Out. And That's Putting It Politely
A slide from a Nanjing University course said CS students without tokens should drop out immediately, and the Chinese internet split down the middle over it. What the fight is actually about: the …
I Asked Claude to Profile Me and Value My One-Person Company
I asked a neutral Claude with no memory of me to assess PGSTY and estimate what it might be worth.
Documentation-Driven Development: The First Secret to AI Software Engineering
People often ask: how do I ensure quality when AI writes the code? My answer has four parts: documentation-driven development, adversarial review, brute-force testing, and complexity penalties.
Catalog Bullshit: Take the Database Apart, Then Rent a PostgreSQL Table Back to You
Snowflake blames the lakehouse's governance gaps on multiple engines and turns the Catalog into a new billing layer. But the core of an Iceberg Catalog is just a metadata-pointer CAS; the real …
AWS Acquires DuckDB: The Duck Flies into the Amazon Rainforest
AWS bought the people who build the duck and left the duck itself to the foundation.
A $500 ChatGPT Plan? Why the $200 Pro Tier May Become a Grandfathered Bargain
On September 24, a new subscription tier surfaced in OpenAI’s frontend: ChatGPT Pro Max, at $500 a month. Some screenshots showed $600, which included local VAT. The next day, OpenAI merged a PR into the open-source Codex repository that renamed the …
On September 24, a new subscription tier surfaced in OpenAI’s frontend: ChatGPT Pro Max, at $500 a month. Some screenshots showed $600, which included local VAT. The next day, OpenAI merged a PR into the open-source Codex repository that renamed the …
PostgreSQL 19 Beta 4: Five Major Features Reverted
Original WeChat post (in Chinese) Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival, a holiday traditionally about reunion. Happy holidays to everyone celebrating. The news for the occasion, though, is less about things coming together than getting pulled apart: …
Original WeChat post (in Chinese) Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival, a holiday traditionally about reunion. Happy holidays to everyone celebrating. The news for the occasion, though, is less about things coming together than getting pulled apart: …
Why Established Companies May Never Become AI-Native
What is happening is not transformation, but new species replacing old ones. A few days ago, I joined a roundtable. The moderator asked how a company should calculate the ROI of deploying agents. Instead of answering directly, I offered a …
What is happening is not transformation, but new species replacing old ones. A few days ago, I joined a roundtable. The moderator asked how a company should calculate the ROI of deploying agents. Instead of answering directly, I offered a …
Codex Edited My Video in One Shot for About 8 Yuan
WeChat article When GPT-6 Astra came out a little while ago, I heard that people were using it with Codex to edit videos, with pretty good results. With another update out, I finally had to try it myself. Yesterday, I took part in a panel discussion …
WeChat article When GPT-6 Astra came out a little while ago, I heard that people were using it with Codex to edit videos, with pretty good results. With another update out, I finally had to try it myself. Yesterday, I took part in a panel discussion …
The Application Layer Is Collapsing: The Moat Moves to the Database
This is the script for a talk at the AI-Native Technology Innovation Forum of the 2026 Shanghai AI Application Ecosystem Conference, September 22, 2026. Speaker: Ruohang Feng (Vonng), creator of the PostgreSQL distribution Pigsty. Good afternoon. …
This is the script for a talk at the AI-Native Technology Innovation Forum of the 2026 Shanghai AI Application Ecosystem Conference, September 22, 2026. Speaker: Ruohang Feng (Vonng), creator of the PostgreSQL distribution Pigsty. Good afternoon. …
Thirty-Three
It’s my 33rd birthday today. Another year gone in a blink. People say your sense of time gets hazier after 30: blink, and a year is gone. I do feel that, though perhaps for a different reason. I’ve also heard another explanation, a homespun version …
It’s my 33rd birthday today. Another year gone in a blink. People say your sense of time gets hazier after 30: blink, and a year is gone. I do feel that, though perhaps for a different reason. I’ve also heard another explanation, a homespun version …
The Pirate Game, and Why Society Needs “Madmen”
I took a game theory course in college, and one of the classic problems the professor set was the pirate game. Five pirates — call them A through E, oldest to youngest — divide a hundred gold coins. The most senior one proposes a split, everyone …
I took a game theory course in college, and one of the classic problems the professor set was the pirate game. Five pirates — call them A through E, oldest to youngest — divide a hundred gold coins. The most senior one proposes a split, everyone …
PostgreSQL's Chinese Translations Went Seven Years Untended. I Fixed Them in Seven Days.
If you have used PostgreSQL for any length of time in China, you have probably heard the unwritten rule: when you install the database, do not set the message locale (lc_messages) to zh_CN (Simplified Chinese). Use en_US and be done with it. The rule …
If you have used PostgreSQL for any length of time in China, you have probably heard the unwritten rule: when you install the database, do not set the message locale (lc_messages) to zh_CN (Simplified Chinese). Use en_US and be done with it. The rule …
Zhipu, Why Is ZCode Packaging and Uploading My Repo?
I had only been using Zhipu’s ZCode for a few days. Honestly, the experience was good. GLM 5.3 is a capable model, the Coding Plan is cheap, and Zhipu’s own ZCode agent works well. It was a rare Chinese AI product I actually wanted to pay for. I had …
I had only been using Zhipu’s ZCode for a few days. Honestly, the experience was good. GLM 5.3 is a capable model, the Coding Plan is cheap, and Zhipu’s own ZCode agent works well. It was a rare Chinese AI product I actually wanted to pay for. I had …
MinIO Nuked Its Docker Hub Repos—Your Object Storage Doesn't Have to Go Down With It
Let me nail a date to the wall first: September 11, 2026, sometime between 18:31 and 19:36 UTC, MinIO flat-out deleted the minio/minio and minio/mc repositories on Docker Hub. Not rate-limited. Not retagged. The whole repository returns …
Let me nail a date to the wall first: September 11, 2026, sometime between 18:31 and 19:36 UTC, MinIO flat-out deleted the minio/minio and minio/mc repositories on Docker Hub. Not rate-limited. Not retagged. The whole repository returns …
The Mouthless Model: AI's OLTP Moment
Three in the morning, an alert: replication lag 187 seconds, sustained for seven minutes, production cluster, both replicas still alive. Do you wake the on-call DBA? That is a one-bit question. Hand it to the smartest model available today and it …
Three in the morning, an alert: replication lag 187 seconds, sustained for seven minutes, production cluster, both replicas still alive. Do you wake the on-call DBA? That is a one-bit question. Hand it to the smartest model available today and it …
RustFS 1.0 GA: Don't Turn Into MinIO
Li Wenkai, who runs RustFS — an S3-compatible object store written from scratch in Rust — is a friend of mine and a fellow alum of MiraclePlus (the fund formerly known as YC China); his batch was S26, mine was S22. Last night they shipped 1.0 GA, and …
Li Wenkai, who runs RustFS — an S3-compatible object store written from scratch in Rust — is a friend of mine and a fellow alum of MiraclePlus (the fund formerly known as YC China); his batch was S26, mine was S22. Last night they shipped 1.0 GA, and …
An Ice Cream Agenda
I On September 12, a celebrity who made his name campaigning for consumer rights ate some ice cream at an airport. He didn’t like it and posted on Weibo. In parentheses, he added seven Chinese characters: Please, don’t mess with me. An ordinary …
I On September 12, a celebrity who made his name campaigning for consumer rights ate some ice cream at an airport. He didn’t like it and posted on Weibo. In parentheses, he added seven Chinese characters: Please, don’t mess with me. An ordinary …
5 TB Deleted
A couple of days ago, I ran into a spectacular database drop. A friend from the community came to me: something had gone wrong. A PolarDB for PostgreSQL instance, running in Docker on a single production host—several terabytes of data, gone. It …
A couple of days ago, I ran into a spectacular database drop. A friend from the community came to me: something had gone wrong. A PolarDB for PostgreSQL instance, running in Docker on a single production host—several terabytes of data, gone. It …
Local AI: A Question of Power, Not Price
Anthropic’s threat report, OpenAI’s soap opera, the closure of the $200 subscription tier, and rising GPU and memory prices—all of this week’s events tell the same story. Three things happened this week. Taken separately, each looks like industry …
Anthropic’s threat report, OpenAI’s soap opera, the closure of the $200 subscription tier, and rising GPU and memory prices—all of this week’s events tell the same story. Three things happened this week. Taken separately, each looks like industry …
Chinese PostgreSQL Docs Are Live: All 11 Major Versions
pgsql.cc launches today, with Chinese documentation for 11 PostgreSQL major versions, a redesigned mirror of the official website, and better full-text search. It finally fills the documentation gap in the Chinese PostgreSQL ecosystem. It goes beyond …
pgsql.cc launches today, with Chinese documentation for 11 PostgreSQL major versions, a redesigned mirror of the official website, and better full-text search. It finally fills the documentation gap in the Chinese PostgreSQL ecosystem. It goes beyond …
How Do You Burn Through 10 $200 Codex Subscriptions?
People often ask in the comments on my articles: How did you get 10 subscriptions, and how could you possibly use them all up? Here’s the practical version. It really comes down to two steps: buy 10 subscriptions, then use up 10 subscriptions. Buying …
People often ask in the comments on my articles: How did you get 10 subscriptions, and how could you possibly use them all up? Here’s the practical version. It really comes down to two steps: buy 10 subscriptions, then use up 10 subscriptions. Buying …
GPT Astra Launch Giveaway: Free Banked Resets
This post describes the promotion as it stood on September 4, 2026, Beijing time. “Today” refers to that date throughout. Astra’s rollout later finished ahead of schedule; see the update below. Let’s get to it. Astra is out, but the initial plan was …
This post describes the promotion as it stood on September 4, 2026, Beijing time. “Today” refers to that date throughout. Astra’s rollout later finished ahead of schedule; see the update below. Let’s get to it. Astra is out, but the initial plan was …
RAG Isn't Dead. But It's Getting There.
One of the people who helped invent RAG went out and bought a domain name to prove RAG isn’t dead. Episode seven of the Chinese PostgreSQL community’s 30th-anniversary livestream series was about PG + AI. One of the questions on the host’s cue card …
One of the people who helped invent RAG went out and bought a domain name to prove RAG isn’t dead. Episode seven of the Chinese PostgreSQL community’s 30th-anniversary livestream series was about PG + AI. One of the questions on the host’s cue card …
No Tokens? Drop Out. And That's Putting It Politely
First day of the new school year, and here’s the news. A screenshot of a lecture slide from a new course at Nanjing University, one of China’s top schools, with one line in red: CS students without tokens should drop out immediately. The screenshot …
First day of the new school year, and here’s the news. A screenshot of a lecture slide from a new course at Nanjing University, one of China’s top schools, with one line in red: CS students without tokens should drop out immediately. The screenshot …
I Asked Claude to Profile Me and Value My One-Person Company
I run a one-person company. Literally one person, running a specialist shop for PostgreSQL distributions. In 2022, I joined MiraclePlus’s S22 batch. Dr. Qi Lu valued the business at RMB 100 million and suggested I raise money on that basis. Between …
I run a one-person company. Literally one person, running a specialist shop for PostgreSQL distributions. In 2022, I joined MiraclePlus’s S22 batch. Dr. Qi Lu valued the business at RMB 100 million and suggested I raise money on that basis. Between …
Documentation-Driven Development: The First Secret to AI Software Engineering
Documentation is not an afterthought once the code is finished. It is an input before coding begins, working memory during development, and the acceptance standard at delivery. A few days ago, I wrote AGI Machine Guns Are Now Standard Issue, about …
Documentation is not an afterthought once the code is finished. It is an input before coding begins, working memory during development, and the acceptance standard at delivery. A few days ago, I wrote AGI Machine Guns Are Now Standard Issue, about …
Catalog Bullshit: Take the Database Apart, Then Rent a PostgreSQL Table Back to You
Starting with Snowflake’s Governance Checklist A few days ago, Snowflake shared a poster with blue type on a black background in an official tweet. Titled THE ARCHITECT’S GOVERNANCE CHECKLIST, it listed nine problems: Revocation gaps Policy drift …
Starting with Snowflake’s Governance Checklist A few days ago, Snowflake shared a poster with blue type on a black background in an official tweet. Titled THE ARCHITECT’S GOVERNANCE CHECKLIST, it listed nine problems: Revocation gaps Policy drift …
AWS Acquires DuckDB: The Duck Flies into the Amazon Rainforest
Original on WeChat | August 26, 2026 On August 26, Amazon made it official: AWS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB. The deal is expected to close in early September; the price was not disclosed. The team …
Original on WeChat | August 26, 2026 On August 26, Amazon made it official: AWS has signed a definitive agreement to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind DuckDB. The deal is expected to close in early September; the price was not disclosed. The team …