macdice

17 ms·

151.
by macdice 9y ago
Interesting that it uses defun, like Common Lisp, the main Lisp-2 dialect, and yet it's clearly a Lisp-1, like Scheme. After (defun f (n) (+ n 1)), evaluating f shows that it's a function (just as in Python, which is a Lisp-1).
152.
by macdice 9y ago
Author of PostgreSQL SKIP LOCKED feature here. I gave a talk about queues in PostgreSQL covering the question "why do this in a database", for what it's worth: https://www.pgcon.org/2016/schedule/tr
153.
by macdice 9y ago
The point is that it's hard to pick the fraction size. US national debt vs Italian lira/Swiss franc exhange rate, humans generate numbers of wide ranging scales and yet it's convenient for computers to deal in fixed size dat
154.
by macdice 9y ago
Some assorted interesting points: * optimistic concurrency control (sometimes you need to retry, but often the optimism pays off) * serializable transaction isolation (something like but not exactly like ssi, rather than 2pl) * ieee 754-200
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by macdice 10y ago
What do you think Postgres should do in this area? It seems there are a bunch of approaches being explored by different teams. I'd be very interest to hear a Spanner person's take.
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by macdice 10y ago
Parallel sequential scan is a building block that enables other work to be done in parallel. Once you've got a way to split up a sequential scan by handing chunks to different workers, those workers can then do other CPU intensive wor
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by macdice 10y ago
Codd gave us the relational model[1], but SQL was the work of Chamberlin and Boyce in System R[2]. It looks pretty familiar to modern eyes! But I believe Oracle was commercialised sooner, and the rest is history. [1] https://ww
158.
by macdice 11y ago
So 'lesser'?