#253 — May 10, 2019
Database Weekly
We Can Do Better Than SQL — Last month we featured EdgeDB, an interesting new database that aims to break the relational/document-oriented schism with its own enhanced flavor of SQL. Here, they look at the history of SQL, its strengths and weaknesses, why they feel their variant is a true evolution, and how we should all be seeking to improve on SQL.
Elvis Pranskevichus
eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this pganalyze eBook, we are looking at the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.
pganalyze sponsor
A Preview of Azure SQL Database Serverless — Last week we looked at how Microsoft is taking Azure SQL Database to the ‘edge’, now it’s going serverless too and is clearly aimed at bursty/intermittent usage given the billing approach.
Microsoft
Nokia Chairman Backs Machine Learning Startup Aiming to Make ML as Easy as SQL — On the face of it, Aito.ai’s fundraising is everyday news, the interesting part is their technology uses either SQL or Elasticsearch’s query format as its interface. SQL truly is going everywhere.
TechCrunch
⏩ IN BRIEF:
- Amazon DocumentDB (AWS's answer to MongoDB) now supports per-second billing, though with a 10 minute minimum charge.
- Google's Cloud TPU Pods are now in beta, giving you cloud access to 'supercomputer scale' machine learning.
- AWS EC2 has a new (I3en) I/O optimized instances aimed specifically at database and analytics workloads.
- DigitalOcean's managed PostgreSQL service is now generally available. When I checked the preview, it also included the TimescaleDB extension (amongst many others) which may be of interest to you.
- Citus Data, recently acquired by Microsoft, has rolled their tech into a new scaling feature for Azure Database for PostgreSQL called Hyperscale (Citus).
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse continues to get better, with a variety of advancements such as workload prioritization, dynamic data masking, and support for querying JSON data.
💻 Jobs
Find A DB Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers.
Vettery
📒 Tutorials and Opinions
How SoundCloud Can Reindex One Billion Documents in One Hour — SoundCloud are heavy users of Elasticsearch and here they tell the tale of the tweaks they made to be able to reindex their entire catalog in an hour.
SoundCloud
SQL Inner and Outer Joins — A brief tour of SQL joins, focusing on the differences between inner and outer joins.
Eli Bendersky
Building with Patterns on MongoDB — The summary of a four month series of posts about different document-oriented database data modeling patterns. It’s by and about MongoDB but the principles covered will carry across to other document-oriented NoSQL systems.
Daniel Coupal and Ken W. Alger
Getting Up and Running with Aurora Serverless — If you want a fast, MySQL or Postgres compatible database on AWS, Aurora is a great choice, but if you want it on demand, Aurora Serverless takes it that one step further. This is a reasonable tour of the fundamentals.
Manish Pandit
Repeatable MongoDB Performance Tests: How CPU Options Are Best Disabled — A great post from the MongoDB Engineering Journal looking at recent efforts to improve the repeatability of MongoDB performance tests being run on EC2 instances. In short, there are a variety of CPU options that can make tests ‘noisier’, so turn them off if you want to do direct comparisons.
Henrik Ingo
🛠 Code and Tools
SQL Cards: A Set of Cards to Help You Learn or Teach SQL — The presentation on this is top notch. You get a PDF you can print out to make the cards for yourself.
Julien Bgn
MongoDB’s Official Brew Tap Now Open And Flowing — We now have our own official MongoDB Tap on Brew which makes it simpler than ever to install the latest MongoDB.
MongoDB sponsor
pg_auto_failover: Automated Failover and High-availability in Postgres — pg_auto_failover aims to provide simple, automated failover built on streaming replication, with no external dependencies.
Lukas Fittl (Microsoft)
sql.js: SQLite Compiled to JavaScript (and Webassembly) — Naturally experimental, 1.0 just dropped with Webassembly support and based upon the latest SQLite version (3.28.0). Want to play? Here’s a live demo.
Alon Zakai
rqlite 4.5.0: Using SQLite as a Distributed Database — A distributed relational database, which uses SQLite as its storage engine.
rqlite