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#Databases
2 posts
May 27, 2026
Time-Series Databases: How They Store Billions of Points in a Couple of Bytes Each
Traditional B-tree databases collapse under append-only telemetry. This is a deep dive into how TSDBs ingest millions of points per second — WAL, MemTables, LSM compaction, and the Gorilla compression that squeezes a 16-byte data point down to ~1.37 bytes. Covers cardinality, data modeling, and how to pick between Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, TimescaleDB, and InfluxDB.
DatabasesTime-SeriesObservability
April 5, 2026
Netflix Uses Cassandra. Instagram Uses PostgreSQL. Twitter Uses Redis. They're All Right.
Netflix writes 3M records/sec. Instagram serves a billion users. Twitter handles 300K timeline reads/sec. Each picked a radically different database — not because one is better, but because their access patterns are fundamentally different. This post reverse-engineers all three architectures and gives you a mental framework for making these decisions yourself.
System DesignDatabasesCassandra