I don’t remember how I found it or who sent it to me (probably Ben Goldberg at BaDaBing! Records), but I know it blew my mind apart immediately, and I kept thinking about it for days, weeks, months after. I highly doubt IC would exist without it. From the ~colorful~ opening to the spine-shivering final… Continue reading The Original Inspiration
The story of Infinite Catalog
It all started in 2009… I’d released a few things on my DIY label Infinite Best, and gotten hired by the great BaDaBing! Records in Brooklyn. One of my many jobs there was to do the royalty accounting using spreadsheets. (This is Hunter btw – I’m the co-founder of Infinite Catalog, along with Udbhav Gupta.… Continue reading The story of Infinite Catalog
We Are Living in a Materialized World
Here at IC, the main technical challenge we face is adding up lots of numbers in a dynamic and performant way. The advent of streaming means that modern royalty accounting involves millions of individual transactions, and even the most optimized database queries start suffering from performance issues. We’ve spent the last couple of months building architecture to handle this issue, and I’m excited to share what we’ve come up with. It relies on two main pieces: materialized views in our PostgreSQL database, and leveraging a change data capture event stream in Kafka to trigger refreshing those materialized views.