Notes from the build

Engineering practice, design decisions and what we learn from shipping software for other companies.

Showing 5 of 5 articles

Cache Eviction Policies in Storage Engines

Caching stores frequently accessed items in fast volatile storage. The interesting part is deciding what to evict, and when.

Generating Zipfian Distributions Using Rejection Inversion

Rejection inversion is a sampling method for discrete monotone distributions. Here is how to use it to benchmark and test software.

Understanding Rejection–Inversion Sampling for Zipf Distributions

The theory behind sampling from Zipfian distributions, and why the inverse CDF is not always enough.

Cumulative Distribution Function and Inverse CDF

What CDF and inverse CDF mean, and how they turn a uniform random number into a sample from any distribution.

Why B+ Trees Still Matter in the Age of Cloud Databases

Cloud databases changed the economics of storage, but the B+ tree is still the default answer for ordered data on disk.