Technical writing on web platforms, TypeScript, static delivery, and the engineering details behind shipping reliable software.https://nga-tran.github.io/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/datafusion-plan-visualizer/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/datafusion-plan-visualizer/A staycation project that turns DataFusion EXPLAIN output into an Excalidraw diagram — paste a plan, click Visualize, and see sort order, pushdown, and parallel streams in color.Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/scaling-queries-distributed-datafusion/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/scaling-queries-distributed-datafusion/How a two-table product/sales query — sales every 30 minutes for grocery products — stays streaming on one node and scales near-linearly across workers.Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/dagstuhl-robust-queries-stream-processing/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/dagstuhl-robust-queries-stream-processing/Notes from Seminar 26311 — a useful week of industry and academia on hard database problems, and a small-group project I plan to keep building.Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/query-optimization-progressive-evaluation-influxdb/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/query-optimization-progressive-evaluation-influxdb/Which SQL qualifies for ProgressiveEvalExec, how to see it in EXPLAIN, and how mixed overlapping files are still evaluated newest-first.Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/making-most-recent-value-queries-faster/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/making-most-recent-value-queries-faster/How databases optimize queries — and how a ProgressiveEval operator made most-recent-value queries in InfluxDB 3 hundreds of times faster.Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/how-to-read-influxdb-3-query-plans/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/how-to-read-influxdb-3-query-plans/How to read a query plan in InfluxDB 3.0 — logical versus physical plans, EXPLAIN, and a leading-edge example.Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/partitioning-data-query-performance-influxdb-3/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/partitioning-data-query-performance-influxdb-3/Partitioning schemes supported by InfluxDB 3.0 and the trade-offs between large and small numbers of partitions.Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/influxdb-3-system-architecture/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/influxdb-3-system-architecture/The architecture of InfluxDB IOx (InfluxDB 3.0) — a cloud-scalable database for high-performance load and query on time series.Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/compactor-hidden-engine-database-performance/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/compactor-hidden-engine-database-performance/A hidden database server that handles post-ingestion and pre-query workloads so ingest and query do not share CPU and memory with compaction.Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/using-deduplication-eventually-consistent-transactions/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/using-deduplication-eventually-consistent-transactions/Deduplication as an alternative to transactions for eventually consistent use cases of a distributed database with defined primary keys.Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/partitioning-performance-sharding-database-system/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/partitioning-performance-sharding-database-system/How partitioning inside a shard adds pruning, intra-node parallelism, and fast deletion, and how to manage hot versus cold partitions.Fri, 18 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/scaling-throughput-performance-sharding-database-system/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/scaling-throughput-performance-sharding-database-system/Understand the two dimensions of scaling for database query and ingest workloads, and how sharding can make scaling elastic — or not.Wed, 16 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://nga-tran.github.io/blog/vertica-eon-vs-snowflake/https://nga-tran.github.io/blog/vertica-eon-vs-snowflake/How Vertica Eon and Snowflake both separate storage from compute — and where their architectures, caches, and scaling models diverge.Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT