Pierre Zemb's Blog

The architecture I couldn't explain🔗 One thing always puzzled me about FoundationDB: compared to many distributed databases, its architecture looks almost excessive: GRV proxies, commit proxies, resolvers, log servers, storage servers, and that's only the…

We have been using Apache Avro for years as one of the binary encodings for Materia's records stored in FoundationDB.

"I'm not going to write a PostgreSQL fake."

BugBash 2026 was two days in Washington D.C., organized by Antithesis, dedicated to extracting reliable software from the slop factory.

Your CI pipeline spins up Kafka, Postgres, and Redis in Docker containers.

Diving Into is a blogpost series where we are digging a specific part of the project's codebase.

When you build a system on top of a key-value store like FoundationDB, you eventually need secondary indexes.

People are right to fear LLM-generated code.

FoundationDB gives you serializable transactions with external consistency, automatic sharding, and fault tolerance.

In a few months, I went from skeptic to heavy user.

2025 was the year I stopped managing and started shipping software again.

I truly think LLMs are changing how we write software.

After one trillion CPU-hours of simulation testing, FoundationDB has been stress-tested under conditions far worse than any production environment.

Diving Into is a blogpost series where we dig into specific parts of a project's codebase.

Diving Into is a blogpost series where we are digging a specific part of the project's codebase.

While working on FoundationDB-rs, I hit a design problem that seemed like it would require complex trait gymnastics.

I keep having the same conversation with junior developers.

While working on moonpool, my hobby project for studying and backporting FoundationDB's low-level engineering concepts (actor model, deterministic simulation, network fault injection), Claude Code did something remarkable: it found a bug I didn't know exi…

Summary: The difference between shipped and operated software is the difference between something you can run and forget, and something that demands ongoing, hands-on care.

I was listening to a couple of podcasts the other day and stumbled across two episodes that were so compelling I had to stop my chores and listen.

For years, I was a serial distro-hopper, working my way through Ubuntu, Arch, Gentoo, Exherbo, Void Linux, Fedora, Pop!

That “YATTA!”

Introducing the FoundationDB Record Layer🔗 Before we dive into the specifics of handling large operations with continuations (the main topic of this post), let's briefly introduce the FoundationDB Record Layer.

Tokio is the powerhouse of asynchronous Rust, celebrated for its blazing speed and robust concurrency primitives.

This article has been translated from my original French presentation at the upcoming Devoxx France 2025, titled "What if we embraced simulation-driven development?".

I recently attended BugBash 2025, a software reliability conference organized by Antithesis in Washington, D.C. during April 3-4, 2025.

Ordered key-value stores like HBase, FoundationDB or RocksDB store keys in lexicographical order.

FoundationDB is a powerful, distributed database designed to handle massive workloads with high consistency guarantees.

As we approach 5 million downloads of the FoundationDB Rust crate (4,998,185 at the time of writing), I wanted to share some insights into how I ensure the safety of the crate.

Time flies—it’s already 2025!

While FoundationDB allows you to obtain sub-milliseconds transactions’s latency without any knob-tuning, we had to bump a bit memory usage for Redwood under certain usage and workload.

I have been working around FoundationDB for several years now, and the new upcoming version is fixing one of the most evil and painful caveats you can deal with when writing layers: commit_unknown_result.

I really like using RSS feeds.

Learning distributed systems is tough.

As I'm working on my latest contribution around FoundationDB and Rust, I had the chance to dig a bit into how FoundationDB's bindings are offering helpers to generate keys.

Notes About is a blogpost serie you will find a lot of links, videos, quotes, podcasts to click on about a specific topic.

I’ve just realized that I’ve spent the last decade programming 🤯 While 2020 feels like a strange year, I thought it would be nice to write down a retrospective of the last 10 years 🗓 Learning to program 👨🏻‍💻🔗 I wrote my first Hello, world program somewhere

TL;DR: I'm really happy to announce my latest open-source project called Record-Store 🚀 Please check it out on https://pierrez.github.io/record-store.

Diving Into is a blogpost serie where we are digging a specific part of the project's basecode.

Notes About is a blogpost serie you will find a lot of links, videos, quotes, podcasts to click on about a specific topic.

This is a repost from OVHcloud's official blogpost., please read it there to support my company.

This is a repost from OVHcloud's official blogpost., please read it there to support my company.

Notes About is a blogpost serie you will find a lot of links, videos, quotes, podcasts to click on about a specific topic.

Diving Into is a blogpost serie where we are digging a specific part of of the project's basecode.

Diving Into is a blogpost serie where we are digging a specific part of of the project's basecode.

In the last few months, there has been numerous blogposts about the end of the Hadoop-era.

Among all features provided by HBase, there is one that is pretty handy to deal with your data's lifecyle: the fact that every cell version can have Time to Live or TTL.

This is a repost from OVH's official blogpost..

Transaction?

HBase?