> MariaDB (and MySQL‑family engines) avoid this entire class of problems by cleaning up row versions at transaction time. There is no background janitor. No vacuum lag. No wraparound timer. No need to tune autovacuum workers or throttle I/O to keep the system responsive.

The article seems a bit misleading. AFAIK, MariaDB (InnoDB) have to "vacuum" too. The implementation details are different between InnoDB and PostgreSQL, and maybe the InnoDB's Undo Log approach is less subject to bloat and maintenance cost, but it still exist as the InnoDB Purge Thread: https://mariadb.com/docs/server/server-usage/storage-engines...

You’re right that every engine has some form of cleanup — that’s unavoidable. But this blog isn’t comparing internal MVCC mechanics or claiming that MariaDB has zero background activity. It’s not a technical deep dive at all. It’s written from the perspective of someone who has overseen operations at scale, and from that vantage point the distinction that matters is when cleanup happens and who carries the operational burden.

MariaDB’s transaction‑time cleanup doesn’t create the same operational surface area that PostgreSQL’s deferred cleanup does. There’s no vacuum lag, no wraparound risk, no autovacuum tuning, and no fleet‑wide SOPs for when cleanup falls behind.

That’s the cost I’m talking about — the cost that lands on ops teams when you’re running hundreds or thousands of instances.

So yes, every engine has cleanup. But only one model turns that cleanup into a recurring operational responsibility that scales with fleet size. That’s the entire point of the article.

1. Yeah, AWS and Cloudflare suffered from bad outages a few weeks/months ago. In my experience AWS has been very stable in the regions I use (us-east-2, eu-west-*), though.

For those using LevelDB, what characteristics made you choose it over SQLite as an embedded key-value store? Speed?

I worked at companies in Paris where it’d be considered "uncommitted" as well, if done consistently. Especially in "small" companies (let’s say fewer than than 20 people). I guess it’s a matter of company culture.

It may be 1000 comments, but including answers to comments, and answers to answers to comments and so on. Since it’s possible to fold "sub threads" of answers in which I am not interested, it becomes pretty manageable.

I say Claude like this: /klod/ which is the French standard pronunciation for this name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_(given_name)

To read more. I know it sounds cliché, but here is the plan: instead of setting a quantitative bar (e.g., read 20 books in 2026), I have 5-6 topics I want to explore and get reasonably knowledgeable about. That’s the goal.

> Viral traffic from Hacker News, Twitter, etc. fades quickly; One-time spikes provide no long-term value; Focus on sustainable organic growth instead

I guess it depends on the audience. Our audience is tech-savvy and like RSS feeds, and it can change everything.

You need to make one big "spike", then some people will subscribe to your RSS feed, and some of them will silently follow you and read the future articles that won’t make it to the HN front page.

But I still agree with the point.

Got some alerts about unreachable websites and APIs about an hour ago (Europe region). Looks settled now.

Looks pretty bad... Hackers on BreachForums are claiming they did that and now have criminal records (wanted persons, victims files, ...) data, and emails from +16M people. If the files contain info on key witnesses, they are now at risk.