Bookmarks (922)

SQLPad 5.0: A Web-Based SQL Editor to Run In Your Private Cloud — Built in JavaScript but available to run via a Docker image, this elegant SQL query runner and visualizer supports MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, Presto, SAP HANA, Cassandra, SQLite and more.

GhostDB: A Distributed, In-Memory, General Purpose Key-Value Data Store — It’s early days for this university project-turned-database and it has some similarities to Redis, but it’s written in Go which is neat, naturally.

Noisia: A 'Harmful Workload Generator' for Postgres — Creates things like deadlocks, transactions that do nothing, and queries that produce on-disk temporary files. Why? For testing, stress-testing your setup, etc. Use carefully and with caution.

RediSearch: A Redis Powered Search Engine — Redis is a fantastic store and cache and its modular nature lets it be expanded in all sorts of ways, such as into a search engine, as here.

Build PostgreSQL Applications Faster and Easier Than Ever with CYPEX — CYPEX is a user-friendly, low code tool to quickly build applications and forms with PostgreSQL at its core.

The Myth of NoSQL (vs. RDBMS) – "Joins Don't Scale?" — Joins can scale just fine, and Franck runs some experiments to prove it. However, the comments are also valuable here as things are more complicated than the author initially assumes.

Why You Should Build Your Next App with a GraphQL Database — While GraphQL doesn’t have to be used with graph databases, this is really trying to sell you on using graph databases and why to prefer GraphQL to, say, Cypher. Of course, this is because Dgraph is a GraphQL-based graph database, but you may still find the case compelling.

Race Conditions/Concurrency Defects in Databases Illustrated — An illustrated look at concurrency, transactions, and some of the race conditions that can occur.

A Redis Core Team Update — Last week we shared the news that Redis’s creator and long-time maintainer, Salvatore Sanfilippo was stepping back, and now we get to learn a little more about who’s taking over.

RavenDB 5.0 Brings Time Series Support — The newest major release of the NoSQL document database features first-class support for time series data (think IoT or operations reporting). Other new features include scheduled document refreshing, database compression, and load-balanced writes.

Data Prep Still Dominates Data Scientists’ Time, Survey Finds — “Data scientists spend about 45% of their time on data preparation tasks” allegedly. I think there’s still a lot of opportunity to build and grow new data preparation systems as it’s an often overlooked area.

How to Move from SQL to Distributed SQL — Scale your database across servers and clouds, while keeping your SQL and your schema. Here’s how: distributed SQL.

Redis's Creator, Salvatore Sanfilippo, Steps Down — In the past ten years the Redis data structure and caching server has found itself at the heart of a lot of our stacks. Its creator, who has led the project almost single handed since its creation, is now stepping down and talks about his preference for building new things versus being a maintainer. Redis is, however, being placed in good hands.

Amazon RDS Proxy Now Generally Available — RDS Proxy is a fully managed database proxy for AWS's RDS database platform and likely to be of particular interest when building apps with large numbers of database connections (such as in a serverless context). The pricing model is an hourly fee per vCPU on the database instances.

CockroachDB: Survive & Thrive. It's in Our DNA — Build apps with the elastic scalability and resilience of NoSQL and the familiarity and integrity of SQL. Get started with CockroachDB for free.

FaunaDB Creators Raise $27M, Change Leadership — Cloud database FaunaDB is becoming quite popular in the serverless space (or ‘client-serverless’ as they call it) so it’s nice to see them grow.

Bitnine Looks to Scale PostgreSQL with AGE — AgensGraph is a transactional graph database built on Postgres but has now morphed into a new project called AGE and is being incubated by Apache.

Calculating Differences Between Rows in SQL — If you have lots of rows that represent changing values (such as time series data, say) being able to calculate the differences between the values over time could be useful, here are some approaches.

▶  Discussing DynamoDB with Alex DeBrie — Just two weeks ago, Alex was chatting with Corey Quinn and now he’s on Software Engineering Daily spreading more useful knowledge about AWS’s managed NoSQL database system.

An Overview of the New DBaaS from MariaDB: SkySQL — MariDB SkySQL is a new DBaaS launched by MariaDB for the users to easily deploy their enterprise edition to the cloud.

A (Not So) Brief But (Very) Accurate History of PL/SQL — A neat story we meant to link to several weeks ago but it’s just come up on our radar again :-)

Why Use AWS Lambda for Data Science? — Serverless is a reasonably good fit for certain types of data science and analytics tasks.

'Serverless Redis' Unveils a Terraform Provider — A lot of projects get released and fade away, but Serverless Redis, a ‘run Redis without thinking about the servers’ service is continuing to push ahead.

Trubka: A CLI Tool for Working with Kafka — A very cute gopher logo on this one :-)

SIGMOD 2020 Publishes Research Paper on CockroachDB — This research paper, published by SIGMOD, presents the design of CockroachDB and its novel transaction model that supports consistent geo-distributed transactions with a scalable SQL interface.

Splitgraph: A Code-Like Data Versioning and Management System — Inspired by Docker and Git and built, initially, for PostgreSQL, Splitgraph’s core idea is it lets you build Docker image-esque ‘data images’.

Database Engineer (Remote) — Got experience designing cloud database infrastructure? Join an independent software company and work with our Senior Database Engineer, helping us design new production systems in Google Cloud.

Jepsen Analysis of Redis-Raft, Raft Consensus for Redis — It’s been a busy time for Jepsen having analyzed Postgres and MongoDB recently (and finding bugs in both!) – this time they take on RedisRaft, a mechanism for bringing Raft consensus to a Redis cluster.

A Surprising Way to Do Data Science with Node.js — This is really aimed at data scientists who don’t use Node right now in order to see how Node can be used to do some data analysis and use D3.js to produce an SVG chart.

▶  ClickHouse: The Fastest Data Warehouse You've Never Heard Of — We’ve heard of it, but this hour long talk does a good job of giving us a feel for what it can do and how it works.

DB Browser for SQLite (DB4S) — A high quality, visual, open source tool to create, design, and edit database files compatible with SQLite. v3.12.0 came out last week with improved table editing and conditional formatting when browsing data (a bit like a spreadsheet might).

Irmin: A Distributed Database Built On The Same Principles as Git — An OCaml library for building mergeable, branchable distributed data stores.

Amazon Honeycode: A New AWS Tool to Build Database Apps without Code — Despite some reservations over the name, this feels a bit like Access meets Excel meets the cloud and will allow a wider range of users to build data-driven online apps without learning to code.

Query 1.6 Billion Rows on QuestDB in Milliseconds, Live — An online demo of QuestDB, a high performance time-series database that promises millisecond latency on keyed aggregations that span over billions of rows. The creator explained more here.

▶  Why DynamoDB is the Database of Choice for Serverless with Alex DeBrie — A 30 minute chat with Alex DeBrie, an AWS consultant who’s increasingly well known for his great DynamoDB articles (and book!)

Go from Zero to Grafana Hero 🌟 (5+ Tutorials) — Learn how to use interactive maps and gauges, alerts, variables & templates to customize Grafana for any project.

Hacker News Discusses 'Intriguing Databases' — I know a few hundred of you came to us via this HN comment thread (hi!) but it turned into a really good one with database users and creators galore discussing the merits of various newer, non-mainstream databases like TimescaleDB, TerminusDB, and Dolt.

Using SQLite as an Application File Format? — It’s not necessarily a bad idea and presents a good alternative to a custom file format in many scenarios.

A Jepsen Analysis of Postgres 12.3 — The name ‘Jepsen’ stirs emotions in any database server creator as their analyses of systems often reveal all sorts of edge cases and flaws. And so it goes with Postgres with a bug in serializable isolation being found.

AWS Snowcone: A Small, Lightweight, Rugged, Edge Storage and Data Transfer Device — AWS has had a variety of Snow family devices for a while which allow for easier, more manageable migration of data into and out of AWS, including an entire truck of hard drives(!) and Snowcone is now the smallest and includes 8 terabytes of storage. US locations only for now.

Apache Spark 3.0 Released — Spark is a popular open source, distributed computing framework most commonly focused on big data processing and analytics. The official release notes are here but I felt Databricks did a better roundup ;-)

HSBC Moves From 65 Relational Databases Into One Global MongoDB Database — HSBC Bank, one of the world’s leading financial institutions, is simplifying its data model by running its applications on MongoDB.

SQLite, Now REPLified Online — SQLite is now a supported language on Repl.it, a popular online coding tool/sandbox. You can try it out here. This could be a very handy way of sharing runnable SQL examples with others.

TiDB 4.0 Released: A Hybrid, Open Source HTAP Database — TiDB is an elastic, real-time Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) database built in Go(lang) that can act like a traditional relational database, a NoSQL database, or an analytical database all out of one box.

Recent Database Technology That Should Be On Your Radar — The post that provoked the Hacker News discussion we linked above. Luc talks briefly about TileDB, Materialize and Prisma.

SQLancer: A Tool for Detecting Logic Bugs in Database Systems — Considered a ‘research prototype’ for now, SQLancer’s job is to stress a database system into returning inconsistent or illogical results. Written in Java, it supports several databases.