Database Guru
Ruohang Feng @Vonng / Pigsty
News, reports, surveys and best practices from the database industry — cutting through the marketing.
Palantir's Ontology Narrative
Ontology is largely a data-modeling method. In enterprise practice, much of it overlaps with familiar database concepts, while the framing can make it feel newer and more differentiated than it really …
I Finished Translating the Second Edition of DDIA: An Eight-Year Parable About AI
Codex translated DDIA's second edition in a single morning. Eight years ago, I spent three months translating the first edition by hand. The contrast reveals just how far AI has come.
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO's repo is officially archived and abandoned. And how AI Agents helped bring it back from the dead. This post explains how a community fork restores the admin console and ships binaries via CI/CD …
China's Domestic Database Industry: I'm Past the Stage of Being Angry
After Bank of China's mobile app crashed on New Year's Day over a domestic database failure, people asked for my take. We watched them build a tower of hype, and now we watch it crumble. Anger is for …
Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker
A conversation between Mike Stonebraker (MIT CSAIL, Turing Award Winner, Creator of PostgreSQL), Andy Pavlo (Carnegie Mellon University), and the DBOS team.
What Kind of Database Do AI Agents Need?
The bottleneck for AI agents is not the database kernel, but integration above it. Muscle memory (in-database computation), associative memory (vector-graph fusion), and the courage to experiment (Git …
MySQL and Baijiu: The Internet’s Obedience Test
MySQL is to the internet what baijiu is to China: harsh, hard to swallow, yet worshipped because culture demands obedience. Both are loyalty tests—will you endure discomfort to fit in?
Victoria: The Observability Stack That Slaps the Industry
VictoriaMetrics is brutally efficient—using a fraction of Prometheus + Loki’s resources for multiples of the performance. Pigsty v4 swaps to the Victoria stack; here’s the beta for anyone eager to try …
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.
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
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 …
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.
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: 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.
Dongchedi Just Exposed “Smart Driving.” Where’s Our Dongku-Di?
Imagine a “closed-course” shootout for domestic databases and clouds, the way Dongchedi just humiliated 30+ autonomous cars. This industry needs its own stress test.
Where Will Databases and DBAs Go in the AI Era?
Who will be revolutionized first - OLTP or OLAP? Integration vs specialization, how to choose? Where will DBAs go in the AI era? Feng's views from the HOW 2025 conference roundtable, organized and …
Stop Arguing, The AI Era Database Has Been Settled
The database for the AI era has been settled. Capital markets are making intensive moves on PostgreSQL targets, with PG having become the default database for the AI era.
Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI
At PGConf.Dev 2025, Bohan Zhang from OpenAI shared a session titled Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI, giving us a peek into the database usage of a top-tier unicorn.
How Many Shops Has etcd Torched?
Plenty. If you’re rolling your own Kubernetes, odds are you’ll crash because etcd ships with a 2 GB time bomb.
MySQL vs. PostgreSQL @ 2025
A 2025 reality check on where PostgreSQL stands relative to MySQL across features, performance, quality, and ecosystem.
Database Planet Collision: When PG Falls for DuckDB
If you ask me, we’re on the brink of a cosmic collision in database-land, and Postgres + DuckDB is the meteor we should all be watching.
Comparing Oracle and PostgreSQL Transaction Systems
The PG community has started punching up: Cybertec's Laurenz Albe breaks down how Oracle's transaction system stacks against PostgreSQL.
Database as Business Architecture
Databases are the core of business architecture, but what happens if we go further and let databases become the business architecture itself?
Palantir's Ontology Narrative
Ontology is largely a data-modeling method. In enterprise practice, much of it overlaps with familiar database concepts, while the framing can make it feel newer and more differentiated than it really …
I Finished Translating the Second Edition of DDIA: An Eight-Year Parable About AI
Codex translated DDIA's second edition in a single morning. Eight years ago, I spent three months translating the first edition by hand. The contrast reveals just how far AI has come.
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO's repo is officially archived and abandoned. And how AI Agents helped bring it back from the dead. This post explains how a community fork restores the admin console and ships binaries via CI/CD …
China's Domestic Database Industry: I'm Past the Stage of Being Angry
After Bank of China's mobile app crashed on New Year's Day over a domestic database failure, people asked for my take. We watched them build a tower of hype, and now we watch it crumble. Anger is for …
Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker
A conversation between Mike Stonebraker (MIT CSAIL, Turing Award Winner, Creator of PostgreSQL), Andy Pavlo (Carnegie Mellon University), and the DBOS team.
What Kind of Database Do AI Agents Need?
The bottleneck for AI agents is not the database kernel, but integration above it. Muscle memory (in-database computation), associative memory (vector-graph fusion), and the courage to experiment (Git …
MySQL and Baijiu: The Internet’s Obedience Test
MySQL is to the internet what baijiu is to China: harsh, hard to swallow, yet worshipped because culture demands obedience. Both are loyalty tests—will you endure discomfort to fit in?
Victoria: The Observability Stack That Slaps the Industry
VictoriaMetrics is brutally efficient—using a fraction of Prometheus + Loki’s resources for multiples of the performance. Pigsty v4 swaps to the Victoria stack; here’s the beta for anyone eager to try …
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.
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
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 …
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.
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: 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.
Dongchedi Just Exposed “Smart Driving.” Where’s Our Dongku-Di?
Imagine a “closed-course” shootout for domestic databases and clouds, the way Dongchedi just humiliated 30+ autonomous cars. This industry needs its own stress test.
Where Will Databases and DBAs Go in the AI Era?
Who will be revolutionized first - OLTP or OLAP? Integration vs specialization, how to choose? Where will DBAs go in the AI era? Feng's views from the HOW 2025 conference roundtable, organized and …
Stop Arguing, The AI Era Database Has Been Settled
The database for the AI era has been settled. Capital markets are making intensive moves on PostgreSQL targets, with PG having become the default database for the AI era.
Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI
At PGConf.Dev 2025, Bohan Zhang from OpenAI shared a session titled Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI, giving us a peek into the database usage of a top-tier unicorn.
How Many Shops Has etcd Torched?
Plenty. If you’re rolling your own Kubernetes, odds are you’ll crash because etcd ships with a 2 GB time bomb.
MySQL vs. PostgreSQL @ 2025
A 2025 reality check on where PostgreSQL stands relative to MySQL across features, performance, quality, and ecosystem.
Database Planet Collision: When PG Falls for DuckDB
If you ask me, we’re on the brink of a cosmic collision in database-land, and Postgres + DuckDB is the meteor we should all be watching.
Comparing Oracle and PostgreSQL Transaction Systems
The PG community has started punching up: Cybertec's Laurenz Albe breaks down how Oracle's transaction system stacks against PostgreSQL.
Database as Business Architecture
Databases are the core of business architecture, but what happens if we go further and let databases become the business architecture itself?
Palantir's Ontology Narrative
I. Two Kinds of Faces By late 2025, Palantir’s market cap had blown past $400 billion — a 20x run in just two years. Every roadshow, every whitepaper, every tech blog from this company hammers the same word: Ontology. The word has been packaged as …
I. Two Kinds of Faces By late 2025, Palantir’s market cap had blown past $400 billion — a 20x run in just two years. Every roadshow, every whitepaper, every tech blog from this company hammers the same word: Ontology. The word has been packaged as …
I Finished Translating the Second Edition of DDIA: An Eight-Year Parable About AI
This morning, I ran ten Codex sessions in parallel and, in less than half a day, translated the final four newly released chapters of DDIA’s second edition. The results surprised me. Formatting, terminology, footnotes, and anchors were nearly perfect …
This morning, I ran ten Codex sessions in parallel and, in less than half a day, translated the final four newly released chapters of DDIA’s second edition. The results surprised me. Formatting, terminology, footnotes, and anchors were nearly perfect …
MinIO Is Dead, Long Live MinIO
MinIO’s open-source repo has been officially archived. No more maintenance. End of an era — but open source doesn’t die that easily. I created a MinIO fork, restored the admin console, rebuilt the binary distribution pipeline, and brought it back to …
MinIO’s open-source repo has been officially archived. No more maintenance. End of an era — but open source doesn’t die that easily. I created a MinIO fork, restored the admin console, rebuilt the binary distribution pipeline, and brought it back to …
China's Domestic Database Industry: I'm Past the Stage of Being Angry
Early on New Year’s Day 2026, while most people were still celebrating the holiday, the Bank of China mobile app went down. Deep Dive: How a Huawei GaussDB Bug Took Down the Bank of China App on New Year’s Day The official statement said a technical …
Early on New Year’s Day 2026, while most people were still celebrating the holiday, the Bank of China mobile app went down. Deep Dive: How a Huawei GaussDB Bug Took Down the Bank of China App on New Year’s Day The official statement said a technical …
Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker
Transcription of Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker Data 2025: The Year in Review with Mike Stonebraker & Andy Pavlo Recorded on December 10, 2025 A conversation between Mike Stonebraker (MIT CSAIL, Turing Award Winner, Creator of …
Transcription of Data 2025: The year in review with Mike Stonebraker Data 2025: The Year in Review with Mike Stonebraker & Andy Pavlo Recorded on December 10, 2025 A conversation between Mike Stonebraker (MIT CSAIL, Turing Award Winner, Creator of …
What Kind of Database Do AI Agents Need?
When we talk about “databases for the AI era,” it is easy to fall into a familiar trap: assuming the shift requires a brand-new storage engine, a revolutionary index structure, or a disruptive query language. But a clear-eyed look at the problem …
When we talk about “databases for the AI era,” it is easy to fall into a familiar trap: assuming the shift requires a brand-new storage engine, a revolutionary index structure, or a disruptive query language. But a clear-eyed look at the problem …
MySQL and Baijiu: The Internet’s Obedience Test
1. Two Painful Shots Remember your first sip of baijiu? It scorched down your throat like a wire of fire. Your face contorted, eyes watered, stomach flipped. Every instinct screamed: this isn’t food, it’s poison. The senior at the table grinned: …
1. Two Painful Shots Remember your first sip of baijiu? It scorched down your throat like a wire of fire. Your face contorted, eyes watered, stomach flipped. Every instinct screamed: this isn’t food, it’s poison. The senior at the table grinned: …
Victoria: The Observability Stack That Slaps the Industry
I’ve spent the last few weeks preparing Pigsty v4.0. The headliner: ripping out Prometheus + Loki and dropping in the full Victoria stack. VictoriaMetrics is no-frills brute force—it just works and it’s ridiculous. The observability portion is done, …
I’ve spent the last few weeks preparing Pigsty v4.0. The headliner: ripping out Prometheus + Loki and dropping in the full Victoria stack. VictoriaMetrics is no-frills brute force—it just works and it’s ridiculous. The observability portion is done, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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” …
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: 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 …
Dongchedi Just Exposed “Smart Driving.” Where’s Our Dongku-Di?
I rented a car today, drove from Shanghai back to Ningbo. Yesterday I watched Dongchedi’s autonomous-driving showdown—closed highway + real city roads + 30+ “smart driving” models. Everyone faceplanted except Tesla. The episode aired and every Tesla …
I rented a car today, drove from Shanghai back to Ningbo. Yesterday I watched Dongchedi’s autonomous-driving showdown—closed highway + real city roads + 30+ “smart driving” models. Everyone faceplanted except Tesla. The episode aired and every Tesla …
Where Will Databases and DBAs Go in the AI Era?
The day before yesterday at the HOW 2025 conference roundtable, Chairman Xiao asked some interesting questions about AI, databases, and DBAs. Here are Feng’s views, organized and published. OLTP / OLAP: Who Gets Revolutionized First? Question: In …
The day before yesterday at the HOW 2025 conference roundtable, Chairman Xiao asked some interesting questions about AI, databases, and DBAs. Here are Feng’s views, organized and published. OLTP / OLAP: Who Gets Revolutionized First? Question: In …
Stop Arguing, The AI Era Database Has Been Settled
This morning, the industry exploded with news of an acquisition. Following Databricks’ $1 billion acquisition of Neon, its rival Snowflake immediately followed by acquiring CrunchyData. According to insiders, this deal was priced at $250 million. …
This morning, the industry exploded with news of an acquisition. Following Databricks’ $1 billion acquisition of Neon, its rival Snowflake immediately followed by acquiring CrunchyData. According to insiders, this deal was priced at $250 million. …
Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI
At PGConf.Dev 2025, Bohan Zhang from OpenAI shared a session titled Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI, giving us a peek into the database usage of a top-tier unicorn. “At OpenAl, we’ve proven that PostgreSQL can scale to support massive …
At PGConf.Dev 2025, Bohan Zhang from OpenAI shared a session titled Scaling Postgres to the next level at OpenAI, giving us a peek into the database usage of a top-tier unicorn. “At OpenAl, we’ve proven that PostgreSQL can scale to support massive …
How Many Shops Has etcd Torched?
A few days ago Yingshi Hurricane shared their Pigsty/PostgreSQL HA incident. The root cause? etcd hit its default 2 GB limit because auto-compaction wasn’t enabled. As @ayanamist put it on X: “Let’s see how many companies this stupid 2 GB design can …
A few days ago Yingshi Hurricane shared their Pigsty/PostgreSQL HA incident. The root cause? etcd hit its default 2 GB limit because auto-compaction wasn’t enabled. As @ayanamist put it on X: “Let’s see how many companies this stupid 2 GB design can …
MySQL vs. PostgreSQL @ 2025
In 2025, PostgreSQL has opened a clear lead over MySQL on features, correctness, performance, and ecosystem—and the gap keeps widening. Here’s the panoramic view. Features Release cadence MySQL just dropped “Innovation” 9.3 (release notes), yet the …
In 2025, PostgreSQL has opened a clear lead over MySQL on features, correctness, performance, and ecosystem—and the gap keeps widening. Here’s the panoramic view. Features Release cadence MySQL just dropped “Innovation” 9.3 (release notes), yet the …
Database Planet Collision: When PG Falls for DuckDB
When I published “PostgreSQL Is Eating the Database World” last year, I tossed out this wild idea: Could Postgres really unify OLTP and OLAP? I had no clue we’d see fireworks so quickly. The PG community’s now in an all-out frenzy to stitch DuckDB …
When I published “PostgreSQL Is Eating the Database World” last year, I tossed out this wild idea: Could Postgres really unify OLTP and OLAP? I had no clue we’d see fireworks so quickly. The PG community’s now in an all-out frenzy to stitch DuckDB …
Comparing Oracle and PostgreSQL Transaction Systems
Original by Laurenz Albe. Translation and commentary by Feng Ruohang. Transactions sit at the heart of relational databases. They guarantee data integrity for applications. SQL defines some transactional behavior but leaves plenty unspecified, so …
Original by Laurenz Albe. Translation and commentary by Feng Ruohang. Transactions sit at the heart of relational databases. They guarantee data integrity for applications. SQL defines some transactional behavior but leaves plenty unspecified, so …
Database as Business Architecture
Databases are the core of business architecture - this is self-evident consensus. But what if we go further and treat databases as business architecture itself, putting business logic, web servers, and even entire front and back ends into databases? …
Databases are the core of business architecture - this is self-evident consensus. But what if we go further and treat databases as business architecture itself, putting business logic, web servers, and even entire front and back ends into databases? …