Archives

Why a metadata filter can make vector search suddenly slow or silently incomplete, and how to pick between pre-filtering, post-filtering, and filter-aware search.

Cost-tiered model routing: send the routine 80% of traffic to a small model, verify the answer before you trust it, and keep the expensive model for the work that actually needs it. Provider-neutral architecture, the arithmetic, and the parts that go wrong.

Aurora DSQL CDC is GA. Here's how to build a fully managed pipeline that lands committed changes in Apache Iceberg on S3 Tables via Kinesis and Firehose, and the record-format details you need to get right.

How to run a major version upgrade on RDS MySQL without breaking your Debezium CDC pipeline. Covers binlog position recovery, GTID auto-positioning, and how to verify you did not lose any changes.

How to find out which layer is making your RAG results move, in an order that costs almost nothing to start, and what to actually do about each one.

Same query, same corpus, different top 10. A tour of every layer in a RAG pipeline that can make retrieval results move, from Unicode normalization to replica divergence to fusion scoring.

A practical look at Aurora PostgreSQL Zero-ETL into Redshift — how NOT NULL really behaves, why your PostgreSQL indexes don't translate, and how retries stay idempotent without enforced uniqueness.

A deep dive into why PostgreSQL major version upgrades take longer than expected — what actually happens under the hood, why parallelism won't save you, and how to diagnose the bottleneck. Applies to Aurora PostgreSQL, RDS PostgreSQL, and self-hosted.

A practical, cloud-agnostic look at adding columns to large tables without downtime — what MySQL 8+ and Postgres 14+ actually let you do, the expand-contract pattern that beats native DDL alone, the OSS tools, and the managed-service caveats.

A practical guide to understanding, diagnosing, and resolving MySQL Data Dictionary inconsistencies on RDS MySQL and Aurora MySQL — before they become emergencies.

Planning the second half of a zero-downtime multi-terabyte migration and version upgrade: how to prove the data matches, rehearse, run the cutover for each wave, and keep a real rollback path.

How to plan a zero-downtime migration and major version upgrade of a multi-terabyte database. Why physical replication does not fit, why logical replication does, and how to split databases and tables into groups you can migrate one at a time.

A short introduction to who I am and what this blog is going to be about — a mix of tech, travel, cooking, cricket, DIY, and gardening.