"I, a notorious villain, was invited for what I was half sure was my long-due comeuppance." -- Best opening line of a technical blog post I've read all year.

The narrator's interjections were a great touch. It's rare to see a post that is this technically deep but also so fun to read. The journey through optimizing the aliasing query felt like a detective story. We, the readers, were right there with you, groaning at the 50GB memory usage and cheering when you got it down to 5GB.

Fantastic work, both on the code and the prose.