The Thursday Letter

One email a week about building and running data infrastructure — what broke, what we changed, and the occasional strong opinion about column stores.

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#48 The query planner is not your enemy Latest Reading an EXPLAIN output without pretending you understood it the first time. 14 Aug Read #47 We deleted our staging environment Six weeks of ephemeral environments later, nobody has asked for it back. 07 Aug Read #46 Backfills, and the art of not melting production Rate limits, checkpoints and knowing when to just let it take a week. 31 Jul Read #45 Nobody reads your dashboard What happened when we instrumented the analytics tool with itself. 24 Jul Read #44 A schema migration in four acts Expand, backfill, contract, and the long wait in between. 17 Jul Read #43 On-call is a product decision Every unpaged incident is a feature someone else has to build twice. 10 Jul Read #42 Cheap tricks for faster dashboards Six changes that cost nothing and one that cost a fortnight. 03 Jul Read #41 The cost of a column Adding one field to a hot table, priced out end to end. 26 Jun Read

The archive goes back to issue #1, November 2023.