Duckdb

This post is part of the series on no-ops linux deployment. The first post covered local development of linux server configuration and essential configuration. The previous installment covers a janky podman installation and configures a reverse proxy to send traffic to a simple container deployment. This is the final post. It covers a more challenging deployment with jobs and rolling restarts, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to hosting. After the previous post, we know how to deploy a container that requires absolutely no configuration and restarts almost instantly. Most of the applications I work on in my daytime job aren’t like that. Let’s take a look at a more complex example. ...

This post is part of the series on no-ops linux deployment. The previous post covered local development of linux server configuration and essential configuration. This installment covers a janky podman installation and configures a reverse proxy to send traffic to a simple container deployment. The final post covers a more challenging deployment with jobs and rolling restarts, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to hosting. At the completion of the previous post, we had automatic installation of a functional Ubuntu server with the bare essentials installed. We did this by writing a base-install ansible role. There’s still a missing ingredient before we can start deploying containers, though! ...

In Running containers on no-ops linux in 2025 I wrote about moving my hobby projects to a European cloud provider. I did an initial, manual setup in Hetzner, which I’ve now automated. This weekend, I tested the setup. It takes me a few minutes now to get everything moved to a new host, and most of that has to do with DNS. I’ve got a reproducible setup, I can quickly provision up a machine locally or in any cloud that has Ubuntu 24.04. Reproducible infrastructure is ✨liberating✨ ...

The past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with DuckDB, and as a consequence I’ve ended up talking about it a lot as well. I’m not going to lie, I really like it! However, experienced programmers will rightly be skeptical to add new technology that overlaps with something that already works great. So why not just use postgres? Well, I really like postgres too, and I think you should consider just using it! But despite both of these technologies being all about tabular data, they’re not really for the same kinds of problems. I think DuckDB is primarily an analysis or ELT tool, and it really excels in this space. postgres can do a lot of the things that DuckDB can do, but not nearly as fast or easily. I wouldn’t want to use DuckDB for a transactional workload, so it’s not going to replace postgres for anything that I use it for. ...