Weeknotes 2026.02
Posted on So 11 Jänner 2026 in Blog
This week I had a round trip and used the new Koralm railway for the first time.
I took the train to Maribor and enjoyed the lovely snowy scenery. The next trip was to Bleibug/Pliberk where I visited the town. Afterward I went to the new station in St. Paul and took the Koralm railway to the new station Weststeiermark.
The station Weststeiermark is quite huge and hopefully there will be shops soon and more people using the station. The last part was a commuter train back to Graz. Due to the new Koralm railway track and a quite good schedule, this can all be done in a single day.
Content:
Story of the week
The story of the week is the yearly database review of Andy Pavlo. He sees continuous domination of Postgres. I will not disagree ;-)
Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
Postgres and the world of data
Postgres 18 - Returning
Ahsan Hadi has written a nice blog post about the new returning feature in Postgres 18: PostgreSQL 18 RETURNING Enhancements: A Game Changer for Modern Applications.
Benchmarks
Tomas Vondra shares some new insights about benchmarks and how he uses them: Stabilizing Benchmarks.
SQLite
Learning from mistakes is sometimes the toughest lesson. Burak Kiran forgot the WAL in a podman container and lost his production database.
Don't Forget the WAL: How I Lost SQLite Data in Podman Containers
Postgres Release Monitor
Security and Privacy
Digital Sovereignty
The European Commission has published a "Call for Evidence" called "Towards European open digital ecosystems": Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech
In Germany, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) has launched a new Portal where around 30.000 companies that are affected by NIS2 will report their cyber security incidents. And this Portal relies on - drum roll - AWS. What could possibly go wrong? Cybersecurity: BSI portal goes online – and uses AWS for it
And Bert Hubert has a nice blog posting about the (mostly) absent technical background of the upper management: Europe's executives need to skill up to solve our total US cloud dependency.
Kernel bugs
Jenny Guanni Qu analyzed the Linux Kernel git commits and made some statistics on how long it takes for a bug to be fixed: Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20.
Data breach ticker
- “Tinder for Nazis” hit by 100GB data leak, thousands of users exposed
- ESA calls cops as crims lift off 500 GB of files, say security black hole still open
- Health care data breach affects over 600,000 patients, Illinois agency says
- US broadband provider Brightspeed investigates breach claims
- NordVPN denies breach claims, says attackers have "dummy data"
AI
New Money for Anthropic
The Guardian has published AI chatbot maker Anthropic plans to raise $10bn to reach $350bn valuation.
ChatGPT marketshare declines
According to SimilarWeb ChatGPT is losing marketshare: ChatGPT is losing market share as Google Gemini gains ground.
Disgusting Grok
I mentioned last week that Grok has a disgusting Feature. According to the Austrian derStandard only paying customers are now allowed to harass other people: Grok: Nur noch zahlende Kunden dürfen andere auf X sexuell belästigen.
Three US-Senators are calling to remove the Grok app from the app stores: Lawmakers call on app stores to remove Grok, X over sexualized deepfakes
Around the world
Accessibility
Josh Winn writes about his experience during Hurricane Helene and why it would be good to have a plain text website:
During Helene, I Just Wanted a Plain Text Website
Lesson from Google
Addy Osmani writes about his experience at Google and the lessons he learned. One particular lesson caught my attention:
If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resistance.
I was thinking about printing this out and handing it over to one of my bosses. He is so convinced about his own ideas that he doesn't stop talking till you give up.