The Internals of PostgreSQL | Hacker News Reader

The Internals of PostgreSQL

interdb.jp

279 pointshjnkk19 comments

"If you work at Amazon, you cannot use and refer to this document because of the copyright violation issues." --> This is really interesting. Does anyone know the background on this? Has anyone else seen this someplace else?

sounds like he is pretty pissed at Amazon selling counterfeit versions of some of his 7 books. And he should be.

Maybe to do with amazon implementing postgres compatibility in aurora? Reading this could leave an argument that it's not a "clean-room" implementation and is a license violation.

Pg's license is like BSD/MIT. So long as they provide attribution why would they bother trying to do a clean room reimplementation?

You might be confusing what a license agreement is vs what copyright assignment is.

doesn't sound like it.

Aurora isn’t a reimplementation anyway, it’s a fork with the storage layer replaced.

Depending on the database, changing the storage layer might require changing almost everything: the query planner, optimizer and executioner intrinsically need to know how storage works to make queries efficient.

Aurora most definitely does not do that for Postgres. Postgres’s storage layer is separate enough that this is quite possible.

Edit: maybe the confusion here is about what “storage layer” means here. The physical row encoding is still the same. What’s different in Aurora (there are white papers on this) is how the WAL records get applied directly to encoding aware distributed as opposed to separately syncing the heap storage to disk.

I believe it's the same case for anyone that contributes to Wine. I remember a recent case, some old Windows source code was leaked and there was a discussion around this policy.

As recommended by multiple users last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30279986#30281910

> I cannot recommend https://www.interdb.jp/pg/ enough, an excellent text with lots of details

Every time this gets posted I go there and learn 1 new thing.

At this rate, I think in a few years I will have learned so much.

This may be a good place to ask: Are there any books that are something like "the SICP/HtDP of databases", in the sense of teaching fundamentals in a principled, mind-expanding way? Something that doesn't focus so much on internals, but on how to design and deal with data models and databases.

Alex Petrov's "Database Internals", perhaps. I know nothing better... https://www.databass.dev/

Silberschatz’s Database System Concepts is a good starting point

It's funny but I think I learned about relational database theory (normal forms and such) from the early chapters and/or appendices of thick computer books written about products like Delphi, FoxPro, and MS Access. The data-modeling knowledge scaled up really well to stand alone database servers of various kinds! It's too bad there isn't something similar for new learners, some in-the-browser environment they could enter to try out their nascent SQL skillz. Ideally something with a big thick paper book, too! (The book is a shibboleth representing stability of API and seriousness of purpose, which are too-rare qualities in today's software products.)

I found the sqlite3 implementation docs to be very educational, particularly the ones about the query planner.

Would be awesome to have an EPUB version of this. The scaling on the website is really weird for me.

I would love this as well. Finding it really hard to read with everything so wide. But the book does look good!

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