Series
Databases feel like magic until you build one. In this series, we take the scariest-sounding pieces of database internals — write-ahead logs, MVCC, crash recovery, B-trees — and build each one from scratch in ~100 lines of TypeScript. No hand-waving: every post ends by pointing the toy implementation at real Postgres and showing that the internals match, column for column. If you can read code, you can understand how databases actually work. Nothing is magic.
Nothing is magic — part of a series on building infrastructure primitives from scratch. I used to think request queuing and connection pooling were deep infrastructure magic — something libraries did
Last time we built a connection pool from scratch. This time: how does a database not lose your data when the power dies? You write a row. The database says OK. A millisecond later, someone trips ove
Part of the Nothing is magic series, where we build database internals from scratch until they stop being magic. Open two psql sessions. Session A: BEGIN; DELETE FROM users; -- deletes all 1 million
