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.
MinIO Is Dead. Who Picks Up the Pieces?
MinIO just entered maintenance mode. What replaces it? Can RustFS step in? I tested the contenders so you don’t have to.
Alipay, Taobao, Xianyu Went Dark. Smells Like a Message Queue Meltdown.
Dec 4, 2025, Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu all cratered. Users got charged while orders still showed “unpaid,” a carbon copy of the 2024 Double-11 fiasco.
MinIO is Dead
MinIO announces it is entering maintenance mode, the dragon-slayer has become the dragon – how MinIO transformed from an open-source S3 alternative to just another commercial software company
Pigsty v3.7: Magneto Award and PG18 Ready
PostgreSQL 18 becomes the default version, EL10 and Debian 13 support added, extensions reach 437, and Pigsty wins the PostgreSQL Magneto Award.
When Answers Become Abundant, Questions Become the New Currency
Your ability to ask questions—and your taste in what to ask—determines your position in the AI era. When answers become commodities, good questions become the new wealth. We are living in the moment …
Why PostgreSQL Will Dominate the AI Era
Context window economics, the polyglot persistence problem, and the triumph of zero-glue architecture make PostgreSQL the database king of the AI era.
Forging a China-Rooted, Global PostgreSQL Distro
PostgreSQL already won. The real battle is the distro layer. Will Chinese developers watch from the sideline or craft a PG “Ubuntu” for the world?
Is PostgreSQL 18 Ready for Production?
With PostgreSQL 18.1 out and the extension ecosystem caught up, Pigsty v3.7 now defaults to PG 18. Time to take it into production.
On Trusting Open-Source Supply Chains
In serious production you can’t rely on an upstream that explicitly says “no guarantees.” When someone says “don’t count on me,” the right answer is “then I’ll run it myself.”
Don't Run Docker Postgres for Production!
Tons of users running the official docker postgres image got burned during recent minor version upgrades. A friendly reminder: think twice before containerizing production databases.
Cloudflare’s Nov 18 Outage, Translated and Dissected
A ClickHouse permission tweak doubled a feature file, tripped a Rust hard limit, and froze Cloudflare’s core traffic for six hours—their worst outage since 2019. Here’s the full translation plus …
PG Extension Cloud: Unlocking PostgreSQL’s Entire Ecosystem
Free, open, no VPN. Install PostgreSQL and 431 extensions on 14 Linux distros × 6 PG versions via native RPM/DEB—and a tiny CLI.
Alicloud “Borrowed” Supabase, the giant free loader
Founders here get asked the same question over and over: what if Alibaba builds the same thing? Alicloud RDS just launched Supabase as a managed service. Exhibit A.
Baidu Cloud Billed 20 Million RMB for 261 KB of Traffic
A billing bug in Baidu Object Storage (BOS) left users waking up owing the cloud 50 million RMB.
AWS’s Official DynamoDB Outage Postmortem
AWS finally published the Oct 20 us-east-1 postmortem. I translated the key parts and added commentary on how one DNS bug toppled half the internet.
How One AWS DNS Failure Cascaded Across Half the Internet
us-east-1’s DNS control plane faceplanted for 15 hours and dragged 142 AWS services—and a good chunk of the public internet—down with it. Here’s the forensic tour.
The PostgreSQL 'Supply Cut' and Trust Issues in Software Supply Chain
PostgreSQL official repos cut off global mirror sync channels, open-source binaries supply disrupted, revealing the true colors of various database and cloud vendors.
DDIA 2nd Edition, Chinese Translation
The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications has released ten chapters. I translated them into Chinese and rebuilt a clean Hugo/Hextra web version for the community.
Column: Postgres Mage
Navigation of articles about PostgreSQL development, administration, principles, ecosystem, tools, architecture design, performance optimization, troubleshooting, and more.
Column: Database Guru
The database world is full of hype and marketing fog. This column cuts through it with blunt commentary, case studies, and technical deep dives.
Column: Cloud-Exit
A whole generation of developers has been told “cloud-first.” This column collects data, case studies, and commentary on the real economics—and traps—of public cloud rental models.
PostgreSQL Dominates Database World, but Who Will Devour PG?
The same forces that once led MongoDB and MySQL toward closure are now at work in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. The PG world needs a distribution that represents "software freedom" values.
KubeSphere: Trust Crisis Behind Open-Source Supply Cut
Deleting images and running away - this isn't about commercial closed-source issues, but supply cut problems that directly destroy years of accumulated community trust.
PostgreSQL Has Dominated the Database World
The 2025 SO global developer survey results are fresh out, and PostgreSQL has become the most popular, most loved, and most wanted database for the third consecutive year. Nothing can stop PostgreSQL …
MinIO Is Dead. Who Picks Up the Pieces?
MinIO just entered maintenance mode. What replaces it? Can RustFS step in? I tested the contenders so you don’t have to.
Alipay, Taobao, Xianyu Went Dark. Smells Like a Message Queue Meltdown.
Dec 4, 2025, Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu all cratered. Users got charged while orders still showed “unpaid,” a carbon copy of the 2024 Double-11 fiasco.
MinIO is Dead
MinIO announces it is entering maintenance mode, the dragon-slayer has become the dragon – how MinIO transformed from an open-source S3 alternative to just another commercial software company
Pigsty v3.7: Magneto Award and PG18 Ready
PostgreSQL 18 becomes the default version, EL10 and Debian 13 support added, extensions reach 437, and Pigsty wins the PostgreSQL Magneto Award.
When Answers Become Abundant, Questions Become the New Currency
Your ability to ask questions—and your taste in what to ask—determines your position in the AI era. When answers become commodities, good questions become the new wealth. We are living in the moment …
Why PostgreSQL Will Dominate the AI Era
Context window economics, the polyglot persistence problem, and the triumph of zero-glue architecture make PostgreSQL the database king of the AI era.
Forging a China-Rooted, Global PostgreSQL Distro
PostgreSQL already won. The real battle is the distro layer. Will Chinese developers watch from the sideline or craft a PG “Ubuntu” for the world?
Is PostgreSQL 18 Ready for Production?
With PostgreSQL 18.1 out and the extension ecosystem caught up, Pigsty v3.7 now defaults to PG 18. Time to take it into production.
On Trusting Open-Source Supply Chains
In serious production you can’t rely on an upstream that explicitly says “no guarantees.” When someone says “don’t count on me,” the right answer is “then I’ll run it myself.”
Don't Run Docker Postgres for Production!
Tons of users running the official docker postgres image got burned during recent minor version upgrades. A friendly reminder: think twice before containerizing production databases.
Cloudflare’s Nov 18 Outage, Translated and Dissected
A ClickHouse permission tweak doubled a feature file, tripped a Rust hard limit, and froze Cloudflare’s core traffic for six hours—their worst outage since 2019. Here’s the full translation plus …
PG Extension Cloud: Unlocking PostgreSQL’s Entire Ecosystem
Free, open, no VPN. Install PostgreSQL and 431 extensions on 14 Linux distros × 6 PG versions via native RPM/DEB—and a tiny CLI.
Alicloud “Borrowed” Supabase, the giant free loader
Founders here get asked the same question over and over: what if Alibaba builds the same thing? Alicloud RDS just launched Supabase as a managed service. Exhibit A.
Baidu Cloud Billed 20 Million RMB for 261 KB of Traffic
A billing bug in Baidu Object Storage (BOS) left users waking up owing the cloud 50 million RMB.
AWS’s Official DynamoDB Outage Postmortem
AWS finally published the Oct 20 us-east-1 postmortem. I translated the key parts and added commentary on how one DNS bug toppled half the internet.
How One AWS DNS Failure Cascaded Across Half the Internet
us-east-1’s DNS control plane faceplanted for 15 hours and dragged 142 AWS services—and a good chunk of the public internet—down with it. Here’s the forensic tour.
The PostgreSQL 'Supply Cut' and Trust Issues in Software Supply Chain
PostgreSQL official repos cut off global mirror sync channels, open-source binaries supply disrupted, revealing the true colors of various database and cloud vendors.
DDIA 2nd Edition, Chinese Translation
The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications has released ten chapters. I translated them into Chinese and rebuilt a clean Hugo/Hextra web version for the community.
Column: Postgres Mage
Navigation of articles about PostgreSQL development, administration, principles, ecosystem, tools, architecture design, performance optimization, troubleshooting, and more.
Column: Database Guru
The database world is full of hype and marketing fog. This column cuts through it with blunt commentary, case studies, and technical deep dives.
Column: Cloud-Exit
A whole generation of developers has been told “cloud-first.” This column collects data, case studies, and commentary on the real economics—and traps—of public cloud rental models.
PostgreSQL Dominates Database World, but Who Will Devour PG?
The same forces that once led MongoDB and MySQL toward closure are now at work in the PostgreSQL ecosystem. The PG world needs a distribution that represents "software freedom" values.
KubeSphere: Trust Crisis Behind Open-Source Supply Cut
Deleting images and running away - this isn't about commercial closed-source issues, but supply cut problems that directly destroy years of accumulated community trust.
PostgreSQL Has Dominated the Database World
The 2025 SO global developer survey results are fresh out, and PostgreSQL has become the most popular, most loved, and most wanted database for the third consecutive year. Nothing can stop PostgreSQL …
MinIO Is Dead. Who Picks Up the Pieces?
MinIO announced maintenance mode two days ago. I ranted in “MinIO Is Dead” and immediately got flooded with “so what now?” The usual suspects: Ceph, RustFS, SeaweedFS, Garage. I packaged all of them for Linux (RPM/DEB) and ran them through the …
MinIO announced maintenance mode two days ago. I ranted in “MinIO Is Dead” and immediately got flooded with “so what now?” The usual suspects: Ceph, RustFS, SeaweedFS, Garage. I packaged all of them for Linux (RPM/DEB) and ran them through the …
Alipay, Taobao, Xianyu Went Dark. Smells Like a Message Queue Meltdown.
Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu simultaneously faceplanted on Dec 4. Cards were debited, yet orders sat frozen at “pending.” The story rhymes perfectly with the 2024 Double-11 outage, so the leading suspect is once again the message queue or whatever …
Taobao, Alipay, and Xianyu simultaneously faceplanted on Dec 4. Cards were debited, yet orders sat frozen at “pending.” The story rhymes perfectly with the 2024 Double-11 outage, so the leading suspect is once again the message queue or whatever …
MinIO is Dead
December 3, 2025 was a day to mark in open-source software history. MinIO’s team updated the project status on GitHub, announcing the MinIO open-source project was entering “maintenance mode.” This basically declared the death of MinIO as an …
December 3, 2025 was a day to mark in open-source software history. MinIO’s team updated the project status on GitHub, announcing the MinIO open-source project was entering “maintenance mode.” This basically declared the death of MinIO as an …
Pigsty v3.7: Magneto Award and PG18 Ready
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v3.7.0 is officially released, bringing complete production-grade PostgreSQL 18 support and support for four new operating systems: Debian 13 and EL 10 across both x86_64/ARM64 architectures. Extension count has …
GitHub Release | Release Note Pigsty v3.7.0 is officially released, bringing complete production-grade PostgreSQL 18 support and support for four new operating systems: Debian 13 and EL 10 across both x86_64/ARM64 architectures. Extension count has …
When Answers Become Abundant, Questions Become the New Currency
Answers are depreciating, and your ability to ask questions determines your position in the AI era. Kevin Kelly once said: “In the future, asking questions will be more valuable than answering them. When answers become commodities, good questions are …
Answers are depreciating, and your ability to ask questions determines your position in the AI era. Kevin Kelly once said: “In the future, asking questions will be more valuable than answering them. When answers become commodities, good questions are …
Why PostgreSQL Will Dominate the AI Era
In the Agent era, the underlying logic of software architecture has changed. Over the past decade, we’ve built microservices and “polyglot persistence” to accommodate the collaboration boundaries of human teams, fragmenting our systems into scattered …
In the Agent era, the underlying logic of software architecture has changed. Over the past decade, we’ve built microservices and “polyglot persistence” to accommodate the collaboration boundaries of human teams, fragmenting our systems into scattered …
Forging a China-Rooted, Global PostgreSQL Distro
Hi, I’m Feng Ruohang, author of Pigsty and an independent open-source contributor. Let’s talk about how to build a PostgreSQL distribution that is rooted in China and useful to the whole world. The question isn’t whether PG will win—it already has. …
Hi, I’m Feng Ruohang, author of Pigsty and an independent open-source contributor. Let’s talk about how to build a PostgreSQL distribution that is rooted in China and useful to the whole world. The question isn’t whether PG will win—it already has. …
Is PostgreSQL 18 Ready for Production?
In Beware the Bleeding Edge: A PostgreSQL Storage Engine Postmortem, I briefly shared my rule of thumb for adopting new PostgreSQL major versions: wait until the second point release (x.1) before putting a new major version into production. Now that …
In Beware the Bleeding Edge: A PostgreSQL Storage Engine Postmortem, I briefly shared my rule of thumb for adopting new PostgreSQL major versions: wait until the second point release (x.1) before putting a new major version into production. Now that …
On Trusting Open-Source Supply Chains
Yesterday’s post “PG ‘Export Controls’ and Supply-Chain Trust” drew a comment from someone claiming to be an admin at a university mirror site (Tsinghua TUNA): “As a university mirror admin, calling us ‘lying flat’ or ‘irresponsible’ is unfair and …
Yesterday’s post “PG ‘Export Controls’ and Supply-Chain Trust” drew a comment from someone claiming to be an admin at a university mirror site (Tsinghua TUNA): “As a university mirror admin, calling us ‘lying flat’ or ‘irresponsible’ is unfair and …
Don't Run Docker Postgres for Production!
Back in 2019, I wrote about “Is running postgres in docker a good idea?” —Don’t run PostgreSQL in containers for production, because you’ll likely hit a pile of issues that simply don’t exist on bare metal or VMs. Well, users of Docker’s “official” …
Back in 2019, I wrote about “Is running postgres in docker a good idea?” —Don’t run PostgreSQL in containers for production, because you’ll likely hit a pile of issues that simply don’t exist on bare metal or VMs. Well, users of Docker’s “official” …
Cloudflare’s Nov 18 Outage, Translated and Dissected
Yesterday the “cyber Bodhisattva” Cloudflare suffered its worst incident since 2019. For six hours, core network traffic couldn’t be delivered. ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Uber—everyone felt it. Root cause: a permission change on ClickHouse made the …
Yesterday the “cyber Bodhisattva” Cloudflare suffered its worst incident since 2019. For six hours, core network traffic couldn’t be delivered. ChatGPT, X, Spotify, Uber—everyone felt it. Root cause: a permission change on ClickHouse made the …
PG Extension Cloud: Unlocking PostgreSQL’s Entire Ecosystem
WeChat link PostgreSQL’s killer feature is extensibility. PostGIS, pgvector, pg_duckdb, pg_search—extensions turn PG into GIS engine, vector DB, analytics warehouse, search cluster. But compiling and shipping them reliably across distros is a …
WeChat link PostgreSQL’s killer feature is extensibility. PostGIS, pgvector, pg_duckdb, pg_search—extensions turn PG into GIS engine, vector DB, analytics warehouse, search cluster. But compiling and shipping them reliably across distros is a …
Alicloud “Borrowed” Supabase, the giant free loader
Chinese founders hear the nightmare scenario constantly: “What happens when Alibaba shows up?” Well, Alicloud RDS just shipped Supabase as a first-party feature. This is what it looks like when a hyperscaler parachutes into your niche. Supabase in a …
Chinese founders hear the nightmare scenario constantly: “What happens when Alibaba shows up?” Well, Alicloud RDS just shipped Supabase as a first-party feature. This is what it looks like when a hyperscaler parachutes into your niche. Supabase in a …
Baidu Cloud Billed 20 Million RMB for 261 KB of Traffic
Someone in a group chat shared an entertaining case today: a developer storing a few hundred megabytes on Baidu Cloud Object Storage (BOS) generated 261.8 KB of outbound download traffic—and got billed 20,374,385.48 RMB (~$2.8 million USD). The …
Someone in a group chat shared an entertaining case today: a developer storing a few hundred megabytes on Baidu Cloud Object Storage (BOS) generated 261.8 KB of outbound download traffic—and got billed 20,374,385.48 RMB (~$2.8 million USD). The …
AWS’s Official DynamoDB Outage Postmortem
AWS just released the official postmortem for the Oct 20 us-east-1 meltdown. It’s one of the rare times we get first-hand detail, so I translated it to Chinese and sprinkled in commentary. Here’s the English recap with my notes. Incident page: …
AWS just released the official postmortem for the Oct 20 us-east-1 meltdown. It’s one of the rare times we get first-hand detail, so I translated it to Chinese and sprinkled in commentary. Here’s the English recap with my notes. Incident page: …
How One AWS DNS Failure Cascaded Across Half the Internet
On Oct 20, 2025, AWS’s crown jewel region us-east-1 spent fifteen hours flailing. More than a thousand companies went dark worldwide. The root cause? An internal DNS entry that stopped resolving. From the moment DNS broke, DynamoDB, EC2, Lambda, and …
On Oct 20, 2025, AWS’s crown jewel region us-east-1 spent fifteen hours flailing. More than a thousand companies went dark worldwide. The root cause? An internal DNS entry that stopped resolving. From the moment DNS broke, DynamoDB, EC2, Lambda, and …
The PostgreSQL 'Supply Cut' and Trust Issues in Software Supply Chain
This month saw a high-profile “open source supply cut” incident — KubeSphere deleting images and running away, but there’s another slightly more subtle “chokepoint case” I mentioned last month — “Chokepoint: PGDG Cuts Mirror Sync Channels”. This …
This month saw a high-profile “open source supply cut” incident — KubeSphere deleting images and running away, but there’s another slightly more subtle “chokepoint case” I mentioned last month — “Chokepoint: PGDG Cuts Mirror Sync Channels”. This …
DDIA 2nd Edition, Chinese Translation
The new DDIA—Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition—has published its first ten chapters. With Claude Code Max 20× on my side, it took two days to translate the released chapters into Chinese and re-render them via Hugo + Hextra for a …
The new DDIA—Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition—has published its first ten chapters. With Claude Code Max 20× on my side, it took two days to translate the released chapters into Chinese and re-render them via Hugo + Hextra for a …
Column: Postgres Mage
Ecosystem PGEXT.DAY 2025, See You There OrioleDB Is Coming! OpenHalo: MySQL-Compatible PG PGFS: Database as Filesystem PostgreSQL Ecosystem Frontier Progress Pig on Elephant: PG Package Manager Pig Release Day Halt: PG Also Can’t Escape Major …
Ecosystem PGEXT.DAY 2025, See You There OrioleDB Is Coming! OpenHalo: MySQL-Compatible PG PGFS: Database as Filesystem PostgreSQL Ecosystem Frontier Progress Pig on Elephant: PG Package Manager Pig Release Day Halt: PG Also Can’t Escape Major …
Column: Database Guru
WeChat Sovereignty & Self-Reliance Build a China-rooted, world-facing PG distribution Supply-chain trust: I won’t bet on absentee maintainers PG “export controls” and supply-chain trust Any domestic DBs that actually deliver? Stop embarrassing us …
WeChat Sovereignty & Self-Reliance Build a China-rooted, world-facing PG distribution Supply-chain trust: I won’t bet on absentee maintainers PG “export controls” and supply-chain trust Any domestic DBs that actually deliver? Stop embarrassing us …
Column: Cloud-Exit
People praise the cloud as carefree, with managed services easing every pain. I say clouds are pig-butchering schemes, hundredfold markups with smug disdain. Cyber landlords hold monopolies, hike the price, extract your vein. They outsource ops, …
People praise the cloud as carefree, with managed services easing every pain. I say clouds are pig-butchering schemes, hundredfold markups with smug disdain. Cyber landlords hold monopolies, hike the price, extract your vein. They outsource ops, …
PostgreSQL Dominates Database World, but Who Will Devour PG?
Percona is a banner-bearer and major third-party vendor in the MySQL ecosystem, and has been advancing into the PostgreSQL space in recent years. The English original of this article was published on the Percona blog this morning. Of course, Percona …
Percona is a banner-bearer and major third-party vendor in the MySQL ecosystem, and has been advancing into the PostgreSQL space in recent years. The English original of this article was published on the Percona blog this morning. Of course, Percona …
KubeSphere: Trust Crisis Behind Open-Source Supply Cut
KubeSphere Sudden Supply Cut: When Open-Source Trust Gets “Unplugged” A “Run” That Shocked the Cloud Native Circle The day before yesterday, QingCloud announced KubeSphere open source edition stops downloads and support, requiring users to migrate …
KubeSphere Sudden Supply Cut: When Open-Source Trust Gets “Unplugged” A “Run” That Shocked the Cloud Native Circle The day before yesterday, QingCloud announced KubeSphere open source edition stops downloads and support, requiring users to migrate …
PostgreSQL Has Dominated the Database World
The 2025 StackOverflow Global Developer Survey results are fresh out, with high-quality questionnaire feedback from 50,000 developers across 177 countries and regions. As a database veteran, I’m most interested in the “Database” section of this …
The 2025 StackOverflow Global Developer Survey results are fresh out, with high-quality questionnaire feedback from 50,000 developers across 177 countries and regions. As a database veteran, I’m most interested in the “Database” section of this …