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Notes, arguments and the decisions they turned into

A dated record of what we discussed, what broke afterwards and what we chose to do about it — kept as written rather than tidied up. It continues into the work in front of us: databases, SQL and NoSQL, LLMs and agents.

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EngineeringDatabases

VictoriaMetrics through the Prometheus provider

LibreDB Studio reads VictoriaMetrics over the Prometheus HTTP API it already speaks. Measured against a live server: what answers, what fails and why, and the one parameter that took the Tables tab from ten metrics to fifty.

EngineeringDatabases

Twenty-eight models, six surfaces, eight hundred and forty runs

What it took to make a local model drive a database agent, and why the model was almost never the problem. Nearly every time a model failed, the ledger showed our own server holding the sentence that would have unblocked it.

EngineeringDatabases

A forum comment found a bug that 100% coverage did not

A reader asked how one create-table form reconciles SQL Server's identity column with PostgreSQL's sequences. It did not, and on SQLite it failed silently rather than loudly. What the fix took, and why a fully covered test suite had nothing to say about any of it.

EngineeringDatabases

How many databases? Sixteen, twenty-six, or forty-two

Three different true answers to the simplest question anyone asks about a database tool, and why the registry behind them records a refusal as carefully as it records a success.

EngineeringDatabases

What one interface across seventeen engines actually costs

One tree, one editor and one results grid for relational, document, key-value, analytical, search and federated engines — and the capability flags that stop that promise from breaking on the fourth engine.

Trino EngineeringDatabasesSecurity

Trino refuses a password over plain HTTP

Measured against a coordinator with authentication switched off, a basic auth header over plain HTTP still answers 401, so the connection is refused early.

Engineering

The tool goes to the data

Why a database IDE belongs in the network beside the database, and what that constraint forces the architecture to look like.

Trino EngineeringDatabases

Trino plans are planned, never analyzed

Only the planning form is ever emitted, because the analyze form executes the statement and a plan view reaching object storage twice is a real invoice.

SQLite EngineeringDatabases

There is no SQLite server to monitor

Health is an integrity check, a journal mode and file sizes, and one per-table figure depends on which built-in driver the deployment is running.