Data EngineeringNOV 6, 2026
Small Files and Too Many Parts: Why Batching Your Inserts Matters
Tiny writes are cheap to send and expensive to keep. We wrote the same 2 million rows as 20,000 files and as 2: 2.9× the bytes, 54× the read time.…
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Data systems, explained visually.
Byte2MB is Priyansh Nigam’s daily newsletter on storage, databases, observability and research, with calculators for the size questions that come up in design reviews.
bytes
Decimal on the left, binary on the right. They differ by 7.4% at a gigabyte.
- B B
- KB KiB
- MB MiB
- GB GiB
- TB TiB
Unit board
SI decimal and IEC binary
- 1 byte = 8 bits
- 1 KB = 1,000 bytes
- 1 KiB = 1,024 bytes
- 1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes
- 1 GB = 10^9 bytes, which is 1,000,000,000 bytes
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Tools
Photo resize in KB
Shrink a photo or signature to 20, 50 or 100 KB.
Target 20, 50, 100 or 200 KBImage to 20 KB
Photo and signature, under 20 KB.
Photo or signature, under 20 KBPDF to 200 KB
Shrink a PDF under 200 KB, no upload.
Any PDF, under 200 KBByte to MB
Bytes into megabytes, decimal and binary.
1,500,000 B → 1.5 MBKB to MB
Divide by 1,000 or by 1,024.
1,536 KB → 1.536 MBMB to GB
The 1,024 trap, labeled.
2,560 MB → 2.56 GBMeasured
Research
Research notes will land here.