Transactional Blog
transactional.blog · Personal blog · on HN since 2023
Alex Miller writes about database internals and transactional systems, including disk I/O, replication, Raft and a BerkeleyDB clone tutorial.
What HN saysHN commenters point to it for its disk I/O diagrams, the BerkeleyDB tutorial series and the copy-and-patch write-up.
27HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
38stories submitted
662story points
11 months agolast shared
2023people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Building BerkeleyDB5 people · 12 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 2Userland Disk I/O: Filesystems, file IO, and durability4 people · 36 points · first shared 2024 · 2 comments on HN
- 3Enough with All the Raft4 people · 8 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 4Data Replication Design Spectrum4 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 5Decomposing Transactional Systems3 people · 156 points · first shared 2025 · 8 comments on HN
- 6Torn Write Detection and Protection3 people · 12 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 7Modern Hardware for Future Databases3 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 8Why Full Text Search Is Hard2 people · 9 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 9Database Startups2 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · 2 comments on HN
- 10S3-Compatible Cloud Storage Costs2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 11Erasure Coding for Distributed Systems1 people · 284 points · first shared 2024 · 57 comments on HN
- 12Copy-and-Patch: A Copy-and-Patch Tutorial1 people · 116 points · first shared 2025 · 19 comments on HN
- 13Calling OCaml from C1 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 14Disaggregated OLTP Systems1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 15A Survey of Database TLS Libraries (2022)1 people · 3 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
shoo · 2025-10-14
the accompanying post "How It Works" is worth reading alongside this tutorial
https://transactional.blog/copy-and-patch/
(key terms: abus[e|ing]: 4, force: 3, trick: 1, chance: 1)
eatonphil · 2025-08-29
Take a look at Alex Miller's diagrams for what function calls are actually doing on various systems.
https://transactional.blog/how-to-learn/disk-io
yarapavan · 2024-04-16
A B-Tree tutorial series implementing an ABI-compatible BerkeleyDB clone.
Direct links to the articles:
1. https://transactional.blog/building-berkeleydb/page-format
2. https://transactional.blog/building-berkeleydb/entry-format
3. https://transactional.blog/building-berkeleydb/api-basics
4. https://transactional.blog/building-berkeleydb/point-reads
klas_segeljakt · 2025-08-16