InfoQ Homepage Database Content on InfoQ
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Open Source pg_vectorsearch Brings More Scalable Vector Search to PostgreSQL
Tiger Data has released pg_vectorsearch, an open source PostgreSQL extension for vector similarity search, currently in alpha. Its PRISM index uses data partitioning and compression instead of the graph-based approach used by pgvector’s HNSW index, reducing memory requirements and index build times.
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Google’s Data Agent Kit Hits GA, Splitting Agent Guardrails Between Skills and IAM
Google has made Data Agent Kit generally available, a free set of MCP tools and 37 open-source skills that connect coding agents to more than fifteen Google Data Cloud services. Two kinds of guardrail ship with it, and practitioners need to tell them apart: one is a skill asking the agent to stop, the other an IAM deny policy that refuses the call.
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Grab Redesigns Counter Service Storage for 50% Lower P99 Latency
Grab migrated its high-volume Counter Service from a wide column database to Aerospike using storage abstraction, shadow traffic, data parity validation, and gradual traffic migration. The redesigned data model consolidated time buckets into map-based records. Grab reports about 50% lower production p99 read latency, 1 TB versus 3 TB of disk usage, and 45% to 50% lower cost per node.
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Spanner Omni Reaches GA, Replacing Google's Atomic Clocks and File System with Software
Google has made Spanner Omni generally available, running its distributed SQL database on-premises, across clouds or on a laptop. Doing so meant replacing Colossus with a Colossus-like abstraction layer and TrueTime with software-based time synchronization. There is no availability SLA, and practitioners are pricing the move in tail latency and operational toil.
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Meta’s ZGateway Cuts ZippyDB Connections 19x While Handling 1B+ Operations per Second
Meta has introduced ZGateway, a stateless proxy for ZippyDB that centralizes connection management, traffic routing, caching, load balancing, and admission control. The gateway handles more than 1 billion operations per second and about 40% of ZippyDB traffic, while Meta’s model estimates a 19x reduction in persistent connections.
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AWS Introduces Foreign Key Constraints in Aurora DSQL
AWS recently announced that Aurora DSQL now supports foreign key constraints, allowing applications to enforce referential integrity directly in the database, including CASCADE, SET NULL, and other referential actions. The addition addresses a long-standing gap that users had explicitly called out as an adoption blocker.
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Uber Redesigns M3DB Sharding with Subclusters to Limit Failure Impact
Uber has redesigned shard placement in M3DB with fixed size subclusters to limit the impact of node failures, maintenance, and cluster scaling. The approach bounds shard dependencies, preserves replica isolation, and uses a greedy algorithm to select shard migrations while avoiding a separate rebalancing pass and unnecessary data movement.
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Google Cloud Launches AI-powered Agents to Simplify Database Lifecycle Management
Google Cloud has introduced AI-powered Database Operations Agents, featuring an Onboarding Agent that streamlines database setup and an Observability Agent that helps automate troubleshooting, performance optimization, and tuning. Integrated with Gemini Cloud Assist, these agents support multiple database services, including AlloyDB, Bigtable, and Spanner.
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Harper Argues against the Multi-System Stack and Releases 5.2
The database platform Harper advocates for a single-runtime architecture that keeps application code and data together, with its benchmark against a Vercel-based stack reporting significantly better performance on live, personalized-data workloads. Harper recently released version 5.2, with a new record cache and more throughput per node.
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How PGSimCity Turns PostgreSQL Complexity into a Virtual City 3D Simulation
Nikolay Samokhvalov has developed PGSimCity, an open-source educational tool that visualises PostgreSQL mechanics as a 3D spatial simulation in the browser. It assists backend developers and site reliability engineers in understanding SQL and the dynamics of kernel execution. The project is available on GitHub and aims to enhance understanding of database architecture through interactive elements.
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Stripe Uses Graph Search and State Machines to Automate Database Remediation
The engineering team at Stripe recently described how they automated database incident recovery by modeling their global infrastructure as a graph. Using graph search algorithms together with state machines, the team computes and executes remediation plans automatically.
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Wiz Discloses CosmosEscape, and Practitioners Debate What Customers Could Have Done
Wiz Research disclosed CosmosEscape, a chain that escaped Azure Cosmos DB's Gremlin sandbox and reached a platform-wide key granting read and write access to every database on the service. Microsoft blocked the entry point within two days but took until July 2026 to remove the key. Practitioners debated shared responsibility and what that rearchitecture actually cost.
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Version Controlled SQL Database Dolt Releases 2.0 with Automatic Storage Cleanup and Compression
DoltHub has recently released Dolt 2.0, a major update to the open source version-controlled SQL database. The latest major version adds automatic storage optimization, including garbage collection and compression, along with improved support for large and vector data types.
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AlloyDB Ships Proxy Models That Replace LLM Calls with Local Inference inside the Database
Google shipped AlloyDB AI functions GA with a proxy model architecture that trains a lightweight local model from LLM outputs, then runs queries at database speed without external calls. Smart batching delivers 2,400x throughput improvement. The proxy model reaches 100,000 rows per second in preview, but benchmark numbers apply only to ai.if in internal testing.
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Netflix Cuts Cassandra Read Latency from Seconds to Milliseconds with Dynamic Partition Splitting
Netflix engineers introduced dynamic partition splitting for Cassandra to address wide partitions in time series workloads. The metadata-driven approach detects oversized partitions, splits them smaller units, and routes reads across child partitions. Netflix reported lower read latency from seconds to milliseconds, reduced timeouts, and improved cluster stability while maintaining transparency.