Notes on Sorted Data

Unexpected seeing this posted here.

I wrote this post mostly out of interest for a personal project and thus it's not actually a very holistic exploration of the topic. May revisit and update it in the future :)

This is a really solid deep-dive. I like how you move from this seems obviouscases (ints, strings) into the subtle edge cases where ordering quietly breaks and then show practical encodings that actually work in byte-lex order. The examples make the pitfalls very concrete, especially the varint and tuple sections. Nice balance between theory and systems-level pragmatism