⏱ 10 min read The Problem: Multi-Service Data Assembly In a microservices architecture, a single client-facing response often requires data from several independent services. […] Read article

⏱ 9 min read What Is a Read-Write Proxy? A read-write proxy is a transparent middleware layer sitting between your application and a database Read article

⏱ 9 min read What Is the Cache-Aside Pattern? Cache-aside (also called lazy loading) is the most common caching strategy in production systems. The Read article

⏱ 11 min read What Is Webhook Fan-Out? Webhook fan-out is the process of delivering a single event to multiple registered external endpoints (webhooks). Read article

⏱ 11 min read What Is a User Segmentation Engine? A user segmentation engine partitions a user base into named groups (segments) based on Read article

⏱ 11 min read Columnar vs Row Storage: The Fundamental Tradeoff In a row-oriented storage engine (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server), all column values for Read article

⏱ 10 min read What Is a Bitmap Index? A bitmap index represents the presence or absence of a column value for each row Read article

⏱ 11 min read Why B-Trees Cannot Index 2D Space A B-tree sorts data along a single dimension. Given a point (lat, lng), there Read article

⏱ 10 min read What Is an Inverted Index? An inverted index maps each term (word or token) to the list of documents that Read article

⏱ 9 min read LSM Tree Structure and the Need for Compaction A Log-Structured Merge-tree (LSM-tree) accepts all writes into an in-memory buffer (MemTable). Read article

⏱ 10 min read What Is a Write-Ahead Log and Why Does It Exist? A write-ahead log (WAL) is the foundation of durability in Read article

⏱ 9 min read MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control) is the foundation of concurrent transaction processing in PostgreSQL, MySQL InnoDB, Oracle, and most modern distributed Read article

⏱ 9 min read Snapshot isolation (SI) is the transaction isolation level used by PostgreSQL (as its default), Oracle, SQL Server, and many distributed Read article

⏱ 10 min read Raft is the consensus algorithm designed to be understandable. It powers etcd (Kubernetes backbone), CockroachDB, TiKV, and many other systems Read article

⏱ 9 min read The gossip protocol is the distributed systems equivalent of rumor spreading: each node periodically shares information with a small random Read article