Materialized View
Materialized View Podcast
Parca, Polar Signals, and FrostDB with Frederic Branczyk
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Parca, Polar Signals, and FrostDB with Frederic Branczyk

Frederic Branczyk is the founder of Polar Signals, a new always-on, zero-instrumentation profiler. We take a tour of Polar Signals's architecture and break down its main components: Parca and FrostDB.
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I recently talked with Frederic Branczyk. Fredric is the founder of Polar Signals, a new always-on, zero-instrumentation profiler. Before Polar Signals, Fredric spent time at Red Hat and CoreOS, where he worked on Kubernetes and Prometheus.

In this interview, Frederic and I break down Polar Signals’s architecture and its main components: Parca and FrostDB. Parca is of particular interest; it is able to achieve its minimally invasive profiling claims by using an eBPF filter that samples the entire OS’s stack at 19hz. Data is then passed to a server and stored into FrostDB, an embedded storage engine built on Datafusion and Parquet.

During the discussion, Frederic mentions several influential papers:


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Materialized View
Materialized View Podcast
Materialized View Podcast offers software infrastructure hot takes, projects, papers, developer interviews, and deep dives. Brought to you by Chris Riccomini.
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