Skip to content
AI NEWS JOURNAL
AI, IN PERSPECTIVE

Search AI news

Search headlines, summaries and articles to connect the dots.

Newest first

Fencing a Postgres primary that might still be alive

Promoting a standby doesn't stop the old Postgres primary from taking writes. Here's how the control plane behind ClickHouse Managed Postgres fences it on bare metal, AWS and GCP, and why the design is fail-open.

Microsoft and Hugging Face have open-sourced the ThinkingBox framework: using the database’s final state as a deterministic reward signal to advance post-training reinforcement learning for agents.

Microsoft and Hugging Face have jointly launched the open-source framework ThinkingBox, which generates binary 0/1 rewards by comparing the LLM agent’s final database state after execution with the expected state, for reinforcement learning-based fine-tuning. The accompanying benchmark, ThinkingBox-Bench, includes 507 real-world backend tasks, none of which were used during training. After 50 steps of GRPO fine-tuning, Qwen3.8-27B achieved a 9.08-percentage-point improvement in pass@1 on the held-out test set, with Observed 20/20 nearly tripling; however, pass@20 declined in some domains, reflecting a trade-off between breadth and stability.

Timeline and related coverage

Chasing that 32 ms tail latency in ClickHouse

A customer saw an extra ~32 ms on simple SELECT queries after idle periods. We traced it to unbatched Native protocol metadata packets overflowing a reset TCP congestion window, reproduced it with network namespaces, and fixed it by batching them.

Can your Postgres survive a bad query?

How do Postgres providers handle a query that exhausts memory? A recursive query benchmark compares query failures and cluster survival across ClickHouse Managed Postgres, Cloud SQL, PlanetScale, and Amazon RDS.

chDB Durable Layer for agent memory

The chDB Durable Layer keeps agent memory fast to query locally while making its analytical state recoverable across laptops, CI jobs, and short-lived sandboxes.