Latest posts from Brandur Leach

With RC1 freshly cut, the release of Postgres 17 is right on the horizon, giving us a host of features, improvements, and optimizations to look forward to.

As a backend developer, one in particular pops off the page, distinguishing itself amongst the dozens of new release items:

Allow btree indexes to more efficiently find a set of values, such as those supplied by IN clauses using constants (Peter Geoghegan, Matthias van de Meent)

The B-tree is Postgres' overwhelmingly most common and best optimized index, used for lookups on a table's primary key or secondary indexes, and undoubtedly powering all kinds of applications all over the world, many of which we interact with on a daily basis.

When we started building Crunchy Bridge two years ago, we chose Ruby as the language to write our database state machine and control plane API. Ruby may not have been the most popular language choice in 2022, but we picked it anyway. A major reason is that everyone on the team already knew it well and liked it. Terse and elegant syntax is perfect for expressing our database state machine logic. Another reason we picked Ruby is that it lets us have a REPL running in production so we can carry out flexible operational work, and expediently thanks to that same terse syntax. Ruby is so efficient for managing a big fleet of servers that it feels a bit like cheating compared to clunky admin dashboards and CLIs.

But Ruby by itself has a major challenge in that it lacks any kind of built-in mechanism for expressing variable and method type signatures. Every one of us had managed large Ruby codebases in the past and wanted to avoid the quagmire of uncertainty around what the types of anything are supposed to be, which makes code hard to reason about and dangerous to change.

That's why we chose to type everything with Sorbet