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The Case for Automated Granular Data Placement in Distributed Databases

Two Roles, One Key

In every horizontally scalable database—Spanner, CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, TiDB, and their descendants—a primary key quietly serves two masters. It is a logical identifier, the application's stable handle for a specific entity. And it is a physical address, the value that determines which node in the cluster stores the row. These two roles are in fundamental tension.

The tension is visible within a single table. A Documents table keyed by DocumentId—a UUID chosen for global uniqueness—scatters documents uniformly across ranges, because range-partitioned databases assign rows to nodes based on key order. But if most transactions access documents belonging to the same tenant, the physical layout is exactly wrong: rows that are always read together are distributed as far apart as the key space allows. The logical choice (UUID for uniqueness) directly conflicts with the physical need (shared prefix for locali

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The distance between deciding and doing is the single most reliable predictor of whether your life will be extraordinary or ordinary. Not talent, not circumstances, not even the quality of your decisions-but how quickly you collapse the space between intention and reality. Think of this gap as a kind of friction coefficient on your existence: the smaller it is, the more of your internal force actually translates into external motion. When you can move from "I should do this" to physically doing it within hours instead of weeks, you're not just accomplishing more-you're operating in a fundamentally different mode of being where your thoughts have immediate consequences in the world, where your inner life and outer life are in constant, tight conversation.

This matters profoundly because success isn't really about outcomes-it's about iteration speed. The person who can decide and act in the same breath gets ten attempts at something while someone with a week-long gap between decision and execution gets one. Th

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Bulk memory allocations for Go

Consider the following code:

s := make([]*Foo, N)
for i := range s {
  s[i] = new(Foo)
  // ...
}

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package interncache

import (
    "encoding/binary"
	"iter"
	"maps"
    "math"
    "math/bits"
    "math/rand/v2"
	"sync/atomic"

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package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"math/bits"
	"slices"
	"sort"
	"strings"
	"unicode"
)

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Notes for a proposal to add per-session and/or per-transaction commit delay to postgresql.

Per session/transaction commit delay

Currently postgres has the commit_delay and commit_sibling global configurations.

To better support mixed workloads it would be significantly easier if a bit more flexibility was permitted, e.g. by allowing individual sessions or transactions to specify different acceptable commit delays, while still providing all required guarantees.

Proposal

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Transparent heap object reuse for Go

a.k.a. have most hot allocation paths be transparently served by dedicated freelists managed by the compiler and runtime

Important

This document is a work in progress. Early feedback and discussions are welcome.

Known TODOs:

• How to handle slices

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// https://go.dev/play/p/374e3zUuZmE

package main

import (
	"crypto/rand"
	"flag"
	"fmt"
	"maps"
	"math/big"

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As part of a reasoning step, Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25 randomly blurted out: 

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Rephrase the information instead of just directly copying the information from the sources.