Filter by Topic:

All Posts(35)Engineering(22)Architecture(19)Performance(11)Product(11)Altertable Agent(10)Data Stack(9)Open Source(4)Culture(3)Analytics(3)MCP Apps(1)Generative UI(1)Agentic UI(1)Model Context Protocol(1)Semantic Layer(1)Pricing(1)

Performance Articles

Performance engineering for analytics: Query optimization, columnar storage, and vectorized execution. Real benchmarks and production latency wins.

MATCH_RECOGNIZE That Scales
AUGUST 7TH, 2026
Sylvain Utard

MATCH_RECOGNIZE That Scales

Performance, Engineering, Open Source

Why funnels belong in MATCH_RECOGNIZE, how active-run automata get expensive, and how our DuckDB extension stays fast against Trino.

READ ARTICLE
Know What a Query Reads Before It Runs
JUNE 15TH, 2026
Florian Valeye

Know What a Query Reads Before It Runs

Architecture, Altertable Agent, Performance

Row estimates only hint at what an agent will read. Bytes pin it down. Our explain returns them from catalog metadata, before the engine touches a file.

READ ARTICLE
Grep your lakehouse
MARCH 27TH, 2026
Sylvain Utard

Grep your lakehouse

Product, Performance, Engineering

Agents fail when they cannot retrieve the right data slice before writing SQL—not because they cannot generate queries.

READ ARTICLE
AI's Event Backbone
MARCH 10TH, 2026
Sylvain Utard

AI's Event Backbone

Product, Performance, Engineering

AI-native products generate a new kind of infrastructure problem. Here's how to build the event backbone for your AI system.

READ ARTICLE
One Billion Rows
FEBRUARY 17TH, 2026
Sylvain Utard

One Billion Rows

Product, Performance, Engineering

At 1 billion rows, every shortcut comes back to collect interest. Here's how we achieved sub-second queries with near-realtime ingestion.

READ ARTICLE
Pruning Top-N Queries
FEBRUARY 3RD, 2026
Sylvain Utard

Pruning Top-N Queries

Open Source, Performance, Architecture

A deep dive into DuckLake PR #668 and how Top-N dynamic filter pruning turns ORDER BY + LIMIT from full scans into metadata-driven execution.

READ ARTICLE
Lessons from Search
JANUARY 13TH, 2026
Sylvain Utard

Lessons from Search

Performance, Architecture, Engineering

Real-time analytics faces the small-file problem search engines solved. DuckLake's tiered compaction brings those merge strategies to streaming analytics.

READ ARTICLE
Stop Batching Analytics
DECEMBER 30TH, 2025
Sylvain Utard

Stop Batching Analytics

Analytics, Architecture, Performance

Why we're forcing analytics through complex batch pipelines when append-only data should work like logs. The warehouse constraint that stopped making sense.

READ ARTICLE
Speed Shapes Understanding
OCTOBER 7TH, 2025
Sylvain Utard

Speed Shapes Understanding

Performance, Product

Speed isn't just a luxury: it's the difference between insight and inertia. We've been deep in TPC-H benchmarks, tuning our analytical engine for AI agents.

READ ARTICLE
NetQuack 4000x Faster
SEPTEMBER 30TH, 2025
Sylvain Utard

NetQuack 4000x Faster

Performance, Engineering

We rewrote NetQuack DuckDB extension, replacing regex with character parsing. Result: 4000x faster—37 seconds down to 0.012 seconds.

READ ARTICLE
Rethinking the Lakehouse
JULY 30TH, 2025
Yannick Utard

Rethinking the Lakehouse

Architecture, Performance, Data Stack

Breaking down our storage and query architecture: why we're leaning into Apache Iceberg and why DuckDB is emerging as our real-time query engine of choice.

READ ARTICLE

Interested in learning more about Altertable?

Sign up