Software
Taming Firefox’s places.sqlite: A Weekend Performance Breakthrough
A bored-weekend side project turned into a tiny masterclass in database design. I rebuilt a “works-for-now” importer into a set-based, transactional loader and dropped runtime from 4 hours to under 10 seconds for 300k+ rows – on an average NVMe host with MariaDB. Same machine, same data, different architecture. Here’s the story, the thinking, and just enough code.
by Sven Reifschneider • 24 September 2025