#databases

A project survives not when its company thrives but when its community can't be captured. The history — MySQL, Redis, Terraform, OpenOffice — says the right to fork is the load-bearing property that keeps open source alive.

"Catalog" means two different things in the lakehouse: the technical catalog in your query path (Unity, Polaris) and the governance catalog beside it (OpenMetadata, DataHub). The second is where lineage, ownership, and trust live — and where the next fight is.

Most companies' data is not big enough to justify a distributed warehouse. A single fat box running DuckDB reads Parquet and Iceberg off S3 directly and answers the median analytics query in under a second, for a fixed bill and no cold start. The big-data era was mostly oversizing.

Iceberg did not win on features. Delta Lake had the bigger installed base and Hudi had the better write path. Iceberg won on governance and an engine-neutral spec, and the moment Databricks paid roughly $2B for Tabular the war was effectively over.

"Zero-ETL" is the data industry's most successful rebrand of the year — and the T never went anywhere. The transformation work does not vanish, it relocates to query time or to the catalog. What is genuinely new is the collapse in data duplication, and that part is worth the hype.

Two pronunciations of SQL have coexisted for nearly fifty years. Why the language was renamed in the first place, and what each pronunciation preserves, turns out to be more interesting than the debate that surrounds it.

A short tour of database name origins. Children, code names, predecessors, acronyms, mythology, and at least one pet duck on a houseboat. Most of the history of the field is hidden inside the names themselves.