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Wednesday, July 15, 2026
Show HN: SirixDB 1.0 Beta – Git-Like Versioning, Diffs, Time-Travel Queries https://ift.tt/iVUI4nT
Show HN: SirixDB 1.0 Beta – Git-Like Versioning, Diffs, Time-Travel Queries Hi HN! I've posted SirixDB here before, back in 2019 ( https://ift.tt/41ybZTl ) and again in 2023 ( https://ift.tt/DOQJ5VF ). The core idea behind SirixDB is, that history is a first-class citizen. Every commit stores a lightweight, queryable revision. You can query any point in time, even individual nodes (for instance JSON values), diff arbitrary revisions, and efficiently track how data evolved without replaying events. Unlike traditional event stores, historical states do not need to be reconstructed by replaying events nor do we have to think about projections. Revisions are directly queryable. A simple example: Jan 1: Record "Price = $100, valid from Jan 1". Stored on Jan 1 (transaction time). Jan 20: Discover price was actually $95 on Jan 1. Commit correction. After correction, you can ask across both axes: - "What did we THINK the price was on Jan 16?" -> $100 (Transaction time) - "What WAS the price on Jan 1?" -> $95 (Valid time) I've worked on this in my spare time since 2013, following its academic precursor (Idefix/Treetank) at the University of Konstanz. The architecture relies on an append-only physical log and a persistent copy-on-write page trie. A high level view of the architecture: Physical Log (append-only, sequential writes) ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ [R1:Root] [R1:P1] [R1:P2] [R2:Root] [R2:P1'] [R3:Root] [R3:P2'] ... │
└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
t=0 t=1 t=2 t=3 t=4 t=5 t=6 → time
Each revision is indexed, and unchanged pages are shared: [Rev 1] [Rev 2] [Rev 3]
│ │ │
▼ ▼ ▼
[Root₁] [Root₂] [Root₃]
│ │ │ │ │ │
│ └─────────┐ │ └────────┐ │ └─────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼ ▼
┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐ ┌──────┐
│ P1 │ │ P2 │ │ P1' │ │ P2' │
└──────┘ └──────┘ └──────┘ └──────┘
Rev 1 Rev 1+2 Rev 2+3 Rev 3
(shared) (shared)
Beneath the root pages sit node and secondary indexes, using a
novel sliding-snapshot algorithm to balance read/write performance.
Everything is queryable using JSONiq via the Brackit compiler. Back in 2019, and even in 2023, SirixDB was very slow due to GC pressure. Unlike most other document stores, SirixDB stores fine-grained nodes, and I came to realize that an on-heap (JVM) representation made up of lots of small objects simply didn't make sense. I measured it with async-profiler — with some help from Andrei Pangin himself — and the result was that the poor throughput was due to the sheer amount of allocations which scaled almost linearly with the number of open transactions. Working a full-time software engineering job, I lacked the energy for a massive spare-time rewrite. About a year ago, I started experimenting with AI. It turned out to be ideal for automating the tedious, repetitive parts of migrating the storage layer to Java's Foreign Function & Memory API, storing pages completely off-heap. Looking further ahead, the append-only, immutable-page design maps naturally onto object storage like S3 and distributed logs like Kafka for a cloud version, and initial prototypes already exist. Maybe that becomes a commercial service one day, but for now, I'm just thrilled to see these core design principles finally proven out.There's an interactive demo, documentation, and the code is on GitHub. I'd love feedback and am happy to answer questions! kind regards Johannes [1] https://sirix.io | https://ift.tt/YWOJqM6 [2] https://ift.tt/GiDajnu [3] https://demo.sirix.io [4] https://sirix.io/docs/ [5] http://brackit.io https://ift.tt/YWOJqM6 July 15, 2026 at 07:46PM
Show HN: Leet Robotics: Learn robotics and ROS2 with hands-on courses https://ift.tt/nj3AyM7
Show HN: Leet Robotics: Learn robotics and ROS2 with hands-on courses Hi all, I've just launched Leet Robotics: a platform to learn robotics hands-on, with a full ROS2 workspace that runs in the browser (Jazzy, Gazebo Harmonic, Foxglove, VS Code) - no install required. The platform also has room for sharing projects and simulation assets as it grows. Our first course is live now: Intro to ROS2 (free to read). The course teaches skills ranging from building your first node to a capstone project of a robot touring a museum world, with every lesson runnable in the online workspace (free accounts get an hour of workspace time daily - enough to follow the course). Would love feedback from this community: on the course, the workspace experience, and what courses to build next. https://ift.tt/576jHCO July 15, 2026 at 04:14PM
Tuesday, July 14, 2026
Show HN: Beautiful Type Erasure with C++26 Reflection https://ift.tt/QkJZxjO
Show HN: Beautiful Type Erasure with C++26 Reflection Try it on Compiler Explorer: https://ift.tt/EL8jZld Check out the source code: https://ift.tt/Vb7ik4K https://ryanjk5.github.io/posts/rjk-duck/ July 14, 2026 at 04:40PM
Show HN: A device for never missing the surf turned into something more https://ift.tt/s3mYyFN
Show HN: A device for never missing the surf turned into something more https://ift.tt/yQmNG7p July 14, 2026 at 11:12PM
Monday, July 13, 2026
Show HN: I implemented a neural network in SQL https://ift.tt/kfVu0q5
Show HN: I implemented a neural network in SQL Two weeks ago I was on my babymoon in Corfu, Greece. While in transit, I was overseeing a GSoC intern submit an important feature to my array database library, Xarray-SQL. He added `to_dataset()`, which completed the roundtrip between thinking of array data in a tabular model simultaneously as gridded rasters (the premise of the project is that every Nd array can be mapped to 2d, where orthogonal dims of the Nd array are just primary keys of a tabular representation). We discussed in chat, now that this feature existed, what demos could we make that would prove this data model works? With down time on a warm beach during a heatwave, cool salty water giving me fresh ideas, I had an idea: what if we used Coiled's Geospatial benchmark discussion as a comprehensive overview of geo and climate queries. Are all of these common operations secretly relational, just with the wrong data model? Using Claude Code on the beach, I can confirm that this seemed to be the case: Claude and I publish a benchmark that illustrated how every common operation in geo and climate sciences (at the 100 TB range) were actually secretly relational operations: https://ift.tt/obL5FXw... . Most surprisingly of all, from these examples was that a core operation, regridding, was just a sparse matrix-vector product. Claude had pointed out to me that in this data model, matmul was just a `SUM(val * val) ... JOIN .. GROUP BY`. This has a direct parallel to einsum notation, but can be expressed in (arguably) elegant SQL syntax! This capability seemed to be greater than the sum of it's parts. Back in the cool water of the Ionian, I thought about the implications of this more deeply. I reflected that, all of the Coiled benchmarks did, deep down, was _post process_ simulations that happen in numerical/array code. Why couldn't these physics calculations be push down into the database also, if we could so matmul in SQL? Then it hit me: maybe they could, if in addition to linear algebra, if SQL could do calculus! https://ift.tt/xtmFzHT Later on, I implemented autograd on top of DataFusion's visitor pattern based on JAX's implementation. In my simplified array model, it turns out that we only care about partial differentiation on the diagonal of the Jacobian, meaning that `grad()`, `jvp` and `vjp` are just row-wise operations! I then implemented a common physics calculation from the coiled benchmark that required gradients. From here, I realized if I can autograd in the database, why can't I create a neural network? As I came back home, I created some slides, and presented this work to DataFusion's inaugural showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1511&v=5o-4hL8vGPw&feature=y... I realized in this synthesis that SQL is not necessarily a toy language for writing neural networks, but in fact, may be highly desirable in the future due to the fundamental principles of relational databases: the logical layer should be independent from the physical layer. If that property holds, and a neural network is a series of relations, could we create a SOTA distributed system for training more easily? For example, if we had one global logical plan of dataflow, could we better distribute work on 1000+ GPUs? Several scientists and engineers and I are working together to explore this weird world of relational arrays at https://xql.systems (discord link at the bottom if you want to get involved). https://ift.tt/MWQGZod July 14, 2026 at 12:00AM
Show HN: PlanWright – A control plane for AI coding agents https://ift.tt/QqYaRXr
Show HN: PlanWright – A control plane for AI coding agents MCP driven control plane for Agentic Engineering. Plan from Claude Desktop, implement in Codex, review in a custom triage agent. All via MCP, all logged and tracked with full documentation of all decisions made by each agent. https://ift.tt/RJhroKs July 13, 2026 at 11:59PM
Sunday, July 12, 2026
Show HN: Scramble Quest https://ift.tt/xIHXB9R
Show HN: Scramble Quest https://ift.tt/b61aSNq July 12, 2026 at 09:58PM
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