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Database branching is one of the best ideas serverless Postgres brought to the mainstream. Fork the database at a point in time, get an isolated copy with all the data, run something risky against it, throw it away. It made preview databases and safe migrations feel routine. But a real application is not just a database. It is a database, plus the files it stores in object storage, plus the backend code that serves it, plus, increasingly, the model and gateway config it calls for AI. When you branch only the database, those other three stay shared. Your "branch" points at the same S3 bucket, the same deployed backend, and the same AI configuration as everything else. So it is half a copy, and the half it leaves out is where a lot of the interesting bugs and the scary migrations live. Neon's platform preview changes what a branch contains. A branch now forks the database and its data, the object storage and its files, the functions that run your backend, and the AI gateway config, all at the same point in time, all isolated. A branch stops being a database copy and becomes a whole environment. To make sure that is a real claim and not a diagram, I took a full-stack project, branched it, and checked every layer. Here is what happened. TL;DR Elsewhere, "branch" means the database only. Object storage, backend deploys, and AI config stay shared, so you bolt on scripts to fake per-branch versions of them. A Neon branch forks all four together: Postgres + data, object storage + files, functions (each branch gets its own URL), and the AI gateway. I proved it: branched a project with a DB, a bucket of files, a function, and the gateway. The branch came up with a copy of the rows, a copy of the files on its own storage endpoint, its own function URL, and the gateway. A write to the branch left main untouched, and deleting the branch removed all of it. That makes a branch a real environment: true preview stacks, whole-state bug reproduction, and disposable sandboxes for agent

"The ISS radiators are expensive and heavy. We're focused on making them cheap and light."

On 9 July 2026 the head of Windows published a post about AI-powered vulnerability discovery. One line in it was a warning to customers: "As AI helps defenders discover more issues, customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release." It does not say how much higher. The post runs about 1400 words and contains no numbers at all. Five days later Microsoft shipped the July package: 1150 CVEs. The number Microsoft would not put in the blog post is sitting in Microsoft's own API. The Security Update Guide publishes every monthly package as machine-readable CVRF, acknowledgments included, no key required. So I pulled twelve months of it and did the arithmetic. What the data says I sampled eight months before the ramp and four after it. Month CVEs Month CVEs 2024-07 454 2026-04 737 2025-01 343 2026-05 991 2025-04 374 2026-06 1281 2025-07 527 2026-07 1150 2025-10 427 2026-01 310 2026-02 169 2026-03 460 The eight pre-ramp months average 383 CVEs. July 2026 is 1150, so the package is 3,0 times the old normal. The baseline broke in April and peaked in June at 1281. April to July inclusive is 4159 CVEs. At the old rate that is 10,9 months of output, delivered in four. The number I am not going to use February 2026 had 169 CVEs. It is the lowest month in two years, less than half the baseline. Divide July by February and you get 6,8 times, which is a much better number for a headline. I am not using it, because choosing your denominator is how honest people produce dishonest numbers. February is an outlier, and the only reason to anchor to it is that it flatters the story. The real multiplier is 3,0. It does not need help. It is not noise The obvious objection is that volume without quality is just a bigger pile. If AI were generating low-value findings that got patched anyway, the severity distribution would sag. It did the opposite. Measure 2025-07 2026-07 CVEs 527 1150 CVSS median 6,5 7,5 CVSS mean 6,47 7,26 CVSS 7,0 and above 48,0 % 71,

Twelve pricing tabs open. Neon, Hetzner, Supabase, Prisma, Scaleway, OVH. My database is half a gigabyte. I was comparing ten-terabyte price curves. At some point this week I typed the words "I am super lost here" about my own infrastructure. I advise companies on this exact class of decision. That sentence still came out of my hands. If you have ever spent an evening deep in provider pricing pages for a workload that fits on a USB stick from 2009, this one is for you. All numbers below come from the live pricing pages as of July 2026. Rates move, so verify before you commit. Three fears, all pointed at the wrong layers I went in worried about getting attacked, running out of space, and being locked in. All three dissolved under ten minutes of honest reading. DDoS lands on the website edge, not the database. My site already sits behind Cloudflare and Vercel, and a database is never publicly exposed. Only the app talks to it. Whichever provider I picked, that attack surface stayed identical. Here is the shape of the stack, and where each fear lives. MANAGED (what I run today) visitors ──> Cloudflare edge ──> Vercel app ──> managed Postgres [DDoS absorbed] [stateless] [never public, app-only access, provider patches, provider backups, provider on-call] SELF-HOSTED (the alternative I priced) visitors ──> Cloudflare edge ──> Vercel app ──> Hetzner CAX11 [DDoS absorbed] [stateless] [Postgres :5432 firewalled to app, SSH hardened, fail2ban + auto- patching = MINE] │ pg_dump every 6h ▼ encrypted ────> Cloudflare R2 [off-site copies] Same edge, same app, same attack surface. Everything in the right-hand box is what changes owners. Storage was a rounding error. My data is 0.5 GB. Even the cheapest self-hosted box includes 40 GB, eighty times headroom before the first extra cent. Lock-in was a phantom too. Managed Postgres is still stock Postgres. Exiting means a dump, a restore, and one connection string change in the deployment environment. Minutes of cutover, no rewrite an

Design + Product Thinking: NYC’s Path to Reliable AI AI delivers value when it’s useful, trusted, and operational. For city services that affect millions, those qualities don’t happen by accident — they come from applying design thinking (who the service is for, how it’s used) together with product thinking (what outcome we’re trying to achieve and how we operate over time). This article explains why hiring designers and product managers matters for NYC’s digital and AI initiatives, summarizes the city’s PIT Crew program, and outlines how Flamelit applies outcome-focused delivery in the public sector. Why design and product roles matter Designers and product managers have distinct but complementary responsibilities that reduce common AI delivery failures: Designers (Design Thinking): center human needs, prototype user flows, and validate that interfaces and decision workflows are understandable and accessible. They surface usability and trust issues early, preventing technically accurate models from becoming unusable in practice. Product managers (Product Thinking): define the measurable outcomes, prioritize use cases, align stakeholders, and manage the lifecycle from discovery to ongoing operations. They ensure work is evaluated against mission impact, not just technical metrics. Together they prevent common failures: building technically impressive models that nobody trusts, deploying brittle systems without human review, or shipping features with unclear ownership that decay in production. PIT Crew and NYC hiring context NYC’s PIT Crew program is a city initiative designed to attract and staff product, engineering, and design talent for public service projects. It’s a practical recognition that public-sector digital transformation needs people skilled in user research, product management, and delivery. Read more about the PIT Crew and how it works here: https://www.nyc.gov/content/pitcrew/pages/ (open in a new tab). Hiring programs like PIT Crew help create the c

SQLite Internals: lcd-ex vs hctree; PostgreSQL 19 SQL/PGQ Rewrites & pg_timetable Migration Today's Highlights This week's highlights feature a deep dive into SQLite's internal data structures, offering insights for advanced optimization. Also, PostgreSQL users gain practical guidance on migrating to pg_timetable for robust job scheduling and understanding how SQL/PGQ translates to efficient joins in PostgreSQL 19. Replacing pgAgent with pg_timetable: Installing as a Linux Service (Planet PostgreSQL) Source: https://postgr.es/p/9pE Regina Obe presents a crucial guide for PostgreSQL administrators looking to modernize their task automation by replacing pgAgent with pg_timetable . This second part of the series focuses specifically on the practical steps of installing and configuring pg_timetable as a systemd service on Linux, ensuring it runs reliably in a production environment. The article details the process from downloading binaries and creating dedicated user accounts to setting up service files and enabling autostart, providing a comprehensive walkthrough for seamless integration. pg_timetable offers significant advantages over pgAgent , including advanced scheduling capabilities, event-driven task execution, parallel job processing, and improved logging. This migration strategy is vital for enhancing the robustness and efficiency of database maintenance, data synchronization, and complex ETL pipelines within the PostgreSQL ecosystem. By following this guide, developers and DBAs can transition to a more powerful and flexible job scheduler, leading to greater control and reliability over their automated PostgreSQL operations. Comment: Migrating to pg_timetable from pgAgent is a significant step forward for job scheduling in PostgreSQL. This guide provides the hands-on steps needed to get it running as a service, which is essential for any production deployment. SQLite Forum Discusses lcd-ex vs hctree (SQLite Forum) Source: https://sqlite.org/forum/info/3494bff42

The Quest Begins (The "Why") I still remember the first time I stared at a LeetCode problem that asked me to count the number of islands in a grid. My initial instinct? Run a BFS/DFS from every unvisited land cell, mark everything reachable, and repeat. It worked, but each query felt like I was re‑exploring the same territory over and over again—like walking the same hallway in a dungeon every time I wanted to open a new door. Then a friend tossed me another problem: “Given a list of friendships, tell me if two people are in the same social circle.” Again, the naive solution was to rebuild the whole graph for every query. I felt like I was stuck in a grind‑fest, repeating the same low‑level work while the real challenge—understanding the structure of the connections—remain. That frustration sparked a question: Is there a way to remember what we’ve already discovered about connectivity, so future queries are instant? The answer, as many of you have guessed, lives in a humble but mighty data structure called Union‑Find (also known as Disjoint Set Union, DSU). The Revelation (The Insight) At its core, Union‑Find is about two simple ideas : Each element starts in its own set – think of every person as a lone adventurer. When we learn that two elements belong together, we merge their sets – we call that a union . The magic isn’t just in merging; it’s in how we find the representative (or “root”) of a set later on. If we naïvely walked up a chain of parents every time, we could end up with O(n) per find—still a grind. Two optimizations turn this into near‑constant time: Union by rank (or size) – always attach the smaller tree under the root of the larger one. This keeps the overall tree shallow, guaranteeing that the height never exceeds log n. Path compression – during a find operation, we make every node we pass point directly to the root. It’s like handing every traveler a map that instantly shows the shortest route to the campfire, so next time they don’t need to trek

RocheDB v0.5.0 has been released. Release: github.com/puffball1567/rochedb/releases/tag/v0.5.0 RocheDB is an open-source NoSQL document and vector store written in Nim. The project is built around one idea: Data locality should be part of the database model, not only an accidental result of indexes, caches, or application code. A lot of database performance discussions start with indexes, query syntax, or caches. Those are important. But layout often decides whether a system is working with the hardware or asking it to fight back. RocheDB v0.5.0 is a step toward making locality explicit at three levels: logical placement with rings; related-data retrieval with stellar locality; physical layout visibility with WAL locality reporting. Ring locality RocheDB uses a ring as a semantic and structural placement unit. An application, import rule, or operator chooses a ring when writing data: users/123/profile users/123/orders shops/1123/orders docs/japan/support tenant/acme/orders/2026 That ring is not only a directory-like label. It is a coordinate in the retrieval space. When a request already knows its natural locality, RocheDB can open that local region first instead of scanning unrelated records and filtering later. roche put --ring = docs/japan --payload = '{"title":"Refund guide","status":"draft"}' --codec = json roche get --ring = docs/japan --filter = '{"status":"draft"}' --selection = '{ title }' The important part is not the string syntax. The important part is that placement and retrieval scope are connected. Short version: a ring is both where data is placed and where retrieval can start. Not only point reads Point reads are important, but many real applications need related data. For example, a user page may need profile data, orders, billing information, and support metadata. In a relational database, that often becomes joins. In a document database, it often becomes manual denormalization or multiple application-side reads. RocheDB v0.5.0 adds a locality mec

JavaScript ships with Array , Set , and Map — but nothing that keeps its elements sorted as you insert. If you've ever built a leaderboard, an order book, or anything that answers "give me the items between X and Y", you know the workaround: push into an array and .sort() after every insertion. It works, until scale punishes you — you're paying O(n log n) over and over for data that was already 99.9% sorted. Python solved this years ago with sortedcontainers , built on an elegant "list of lists" design instead of balanced trees. I just published sorted-collections , which brings that idea to TypeScript — with full credit to the original as its inspiration. What you get SortedList, SortedSet, SortedMap — always sorted, no manual re-sorting, range queries built in. O(log n) insertions, O(√n) positional access via sqrt-decomposition into buckets. Zero runtime dependencies , ~2KB gzip, types included, dual ESM/CJS. Package quality gated in CI with publint , arethetypeswrong , and size-limit . The API in 30 seconds import { SortedList , SortedSet , SortedMap } from " sorted-collections " ; // SortedList: stays sorted on every insert const list = new SortedList ([ 5 , 1 , 4 , 2 , 3 ]); list . add ( 0 ); console . log ([... list ]); // [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5] console . log ( list . at ( 2 )); // 2 — positional access on sorted order // SortedSet: no duplicates, plus set algebra const a = new SortedSet ([ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ]); const b = new SortedSet ([ 3 , 4 , 5 ]); console . log ([... a . intersection ( b )]); // [3, 4] // SortedMap: keys always in order, range queries built in const prices = new SortedMap < number , string > ([ [ 104.5 , " order-3 " ], [ 99.2 , " order-1 " ], [ 101.0 , " order-2 " ], ]); for ( const [ price , id ] of prices . irange ( 100 , 105 )) { console . log ( price , id ); // 101.0 order-2, then 104.5 order-3 } Custom comparators are fully typed: number and string get natural ordering for free; for your own types, TypeScript requires a comparator at compile

New York has become the first state to temporarily halt approval of large data centers, as Gov. Kathy Hochul argues the AI-driven building boom shouldn’t come at the expense of higher electricity costs, water supplies, or local control.

New York’s data center moratorium may become the blueprint for anti-AI movement.

Meta recently open-sourced Brain2Qwerty v2, a noninvasive Brain–Computer Interface (BCI) that can decode sentences from thoughts using electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals from the brain. In evaluations, the system achieved a word accuracy rate 61% on average, compared to 8% for other non-invasive methods. By Anthony Alford

One of the most common questions I hear is: "My API is slow. Where do I start?" The first instinct is usually: Upgrade the server Increase CPU Add more RAM But in many cases, the database query is the real bottleneck . Whenever I investigate a slow Laravel application, I follow the same checklist. It helps me identify performance issues before making unnecessary infrastructure changes. Let's go through it. 1️⃣ Find the Slow Queries First Don't start optimizing random queries. Start with the queries that are executed the most or take the most time. Useful tools: Laravel Telescope Laravel Debugbar (development) MySQL Slow Query Log Application Performance Monitoring (APM) You can't optimize what you haven't measured. 2️⃣ Stop Using SELECT * One of the easiest improvements. ❌ Instead of: SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 10 ; Use: SELECT id , name , email FROM users WHERE id = 10 ; Why? Less data transferred Lower memory usage Faster response Easier for MySQL to use covering indexes Only fetch the columns your application actually needs. 3️⃣ Always Check the Execution Plan Before changing anything, run: EXPLAIN SELECT id , name FROM users WHERE email = 'john@example.com' ; Things I usually look for: Is MySQL scanning the whole table? Is an index being used? How many rows are examined? Is there a temporary table? Is filesort being used? EXPLAIN often tells you exactly why a query is slow. 4️⃣ Verify Your Indexes Indexes are one of the biggest performance improvements you can make—but only when they match your queries. Example: SELECT * FROM orders WHERE customer_id = 100 ; Create an index: CREATE INDEX idx_customer_id ON orders ( customer_id ); Now MySQL can jump directly to the matching rows instead of scanning the entire table. 5️⃣ Look for Composite Index Opportunities Suppose your query is: SELECT id , total FROM orders WHERE customer_id = 10 AND status = 'paid' ; Instead of two separate indexes: customer_id status A composite index is often better: CREATE INDEX idx_cu

7 MongoDB Query Mistakes That Return the Wrong Results VisuaLeaf VisuaLeaf VisuaLeaf Follow Jul 14 7 MongoDB Query Mistakes That Return the Wrong Results # mongodb # coding # software # database 3 reactions Add Comment 5 min read

MongoDB queries look simple. You type a field, give it a value, hit run, and you get your data back. But just because a query runs without throwing an error doesn't mean it worked right. Sometimes you get a blank screen. Sometimes you get way too many records. Other times, the data looks fine at first glance, but it doesn't actually match what you asked for. Most of these slip-ups happen for one basic reason: the query structure doesn't match the way the data actually sits in the database. To show you what we mean, we’ll use a clinic database with a collection called visits . Here is what a typical document looks like: JSON { "_id": "6871b6f9c3f1d1a4c2a10001", "status": "completed", "visitDate": "2026-07-01T09:30:00.000Z", "patient": { "name": "Anna Keller", "age": 34 }, "doctor": { "name": "Dr. James Carter", "specialty": "Cardiology" }, "symptoms": ["cough", "fever"], "prescriptions": [ { "name": "Ibuprofen", "active": false }, { "name": "Paracetamol", "active": true } ], "invoice": { "paid": true, "method": "card", "total": 250 } } You can run these examples right in the VisuaLeaf MongoDB Shell . Using visual tools makes a big difference because you can see exactly what MongoDB is returning in real time. 1. Forgetting the Curly Braces This is just a quick typo, but it breaks things right away. The Mistake: db . visits . find ( status : " completed " ) The Correct Query The find() tool always expects an object. Even if you are only looking for one specific thing, you still need to wrap that condition in curly braces {} . 2. Treating $or Like a Regular Object This one trips a lot of people up because the broken version looks like it should work. The Mistake: db.visits.find({ $or: { status: "completed", "invoice.paid": false } }) What is wrong: $or expects an array of conditions, but this query gives it one object. The error will usually be something like: MongoServerError: $or must be an array The Correct Query The first query is wrong because $or needs an array, n

Drawing from the enduring adaptability of HTML and HTTP, Seph Gentle proposes embedding self-contained schemas directly into file headers, ensuring data remains readable without external definitions. His experimental format prioritises forward, backwards, and sideways compatibility, enabling data format evolution without central coordination or data loss By Olimpiu Pop

TL;DR Traditional SaaS streaming requires exporting sensitive data to a vendor cloud, creating security risks and egress costs. BYOC reverses this model by running the data plane inside the customer’s cloud while the vendor manages the control plane. This keeps data within the enterprise perimeter while still providing a managed platform. Condense builds on this model with AI-driven automation, unified monitoring, and marketplace deployment, enabling private, compliant, and cost-efficient real-time data streaming. The enterprise data landscape is currently defined by a conflict between real-time AI data streaming utility and the strict requirements of data sovereignty . For years, the standard SaaS model forced a compromise. To access premium analytics, companies had to export sensitive telemetry to a vendor cloud. This created massive cloud egress costs and introduced significant security vulnerabilities. Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) for data streaming platforms has emerged as the professional solution to this dilemma. It allows a business to keep data within its own perimeter while benefiting from a fully managed, high-performance ecosystem. The BYOC Architecture: Privacy by Design An experienced analyst views BYOC as a clean separation of concerns. The architecture splits the environment into two distinct layers to ensure raw data never leaves the authorized environment. SaaS Control Plane: This is the management layer hosted by the provider. It handles the brain of the operation. It manages orchestration, user access, and pipeline configuration without ever seeing the actual data packets. Private Data Plane: This is the muscle. The managed Kafka clusters , Kubernetes (K8s) nodes, and storage engines like ClickHouse live inside the customer Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) . By keeping the data plane inside the customer perimeter, telemetry collection remains private. This architecture is the most direct path to satisfying internal security audits and global regulatory

DuckDB Iceberg MERGE, PostgreSQL GUCs, SQLite Optimization Checklist Today's Highlights This week's highlights include powerful new Iceberg data manipulation features in DuckDB v1.5.3 and a deep dive into an obscure PostgreSQL GUC. Plus, the SQLite community discusses a practical optimization checklist for embedded databases. New DuckDB-Iceberg Features in v1.5.3 (DuckDB Blog) Source: https://duckdb.org/2026/05/29/new-iceberg-features.html The latest DuckDB v1.5.3 release significantly enhances its integration with Apache Iceberg, introducing a suite of powerful new features for data engineers and analysts. Key among these are the support for MERGE INTO and ALTER TABLE statements, allowing for more robust data manipulation directly within DuckDB for Iceberg tables. This update enables complex operations like upserting data based on conditions, schema evolution (e.g., adding/dropping columns), and modifying table properties, all achievable through a familiar SQL environment. This capability is crucial for maintaining data integrity and adapting schemas without complex external tooling. Furthermore, DuckDB-Iceberg now supports partition transforms, making it easier to manage and query partitioned Iceberg datasets efficiently by defining how data is distributed across files. The release also brings support for Iceberg V3, ensuring compatibility with the latest features of the Iceberg format, including new manifest list and manifest file layouts which offer performance improvements. These additions position DuckDB as an even stronger tool for building performant data pipelines and performing complex analytics directly on large-scale Iceberg data lakes, fully leveraging DuckDB's in-process analytical capabilities and the flexibility of the Iceberg table format. Comment: This update is a game-changer for working with Iceberg tables directly in DuckDB. MERGE INTO support means simplified ETL for incremental loads, and V3 compatibility ensures we're ready for future Iceberg

The ScyllaDB PHP driver is not a C++ extension anymore. As of 1.4.0 it's pure C23, the ZendCPP template layer we leaned on for the object embed and allocate pattern is deleted, and the build no longer needs a C++ compiler at all. Every hand-written .cpp file is a .c file now (71 of them), the descriptor generator emits .c , and CMake builds with c_std_23 and nothing else. That's the biggest change to how this extension is built since we forked it for PHP 8.0. This is also the release where a plan I opened back in 2023 finally landed. PR #50 laid it out: rewrite the src/Cluster directory to be more maintainable, use Zend Fast Argument Parsing, remove some memory allocations, and add .stub.php files that generate the C headers so nobody has to hand-maintain Zend arginfo by hand. 1.4.0 is that plan finished, and a lot more that grew out of it. The things you'll actually feel: persistent session connect() doesn't allocate a 200-character key string on every call anymore, and the minimum PHP is now 8.3 (8.2 is gone). Nothing in your application code changes, this is almost all under the surface. The .stub.php Build The idea from PR #50 was small. Instead of writing ZEND_BEGIN_ARG_INFO_EX blocks by hand and keeping them in sync with the actual method bodies, write the signature once in a .stub.php file and generate the C arginfo from it. In v1.4.0 that's the whole build. There are 75 .stub.php files now, and each one is just the PHP signature of the class: // src/Keyspace.stub.php interface Keyspace { public function name (): string ; public function replicationClassName (): string ; /** @return array<string, mixed> */ public function replicationOptions (): array ; public function hasDurableWrites (): bool ; /** @return Table|false */ public function table ( string $name ): Table | false ; public function aggregate ( string $name , mixed ... $types ): Aggregate | false ; } At build time CMake runs gen_stub.php (vendored from PHP 8.5's build/gen_stub.php , with two small p

Apple would not comment on the "security breach," which allegedly allowed a former employee to download sensitive files from Apple's network long after he departed the company for rival OpenAI.