#291 — February 14, 2020
Database Weekly
The What, Why, and When of Single-Table Design with DynamoDB — Data modelling when using AWS DynamoDB is quite.. different to when using most other database systems, particularly if you follow the advice to use a single table for all of your records. Alex breaks down how single-table designs work and why you’d take this approach.
Alex DeBrie
Database Research in 2019: The Year in Review — Alex likes to keep up with the latest in DBMS technology and here he covers some of the highlights of what he saw in 2019 along with links to the relevant papers.
Alex Petrov
Learn the Basics of MongoDB in Just Two Hours — Missing out on MongoDB? Don’t wait - Join hundreds of new learners and register for this free course today.
Studio 3T sponsor
▶ Discussing Advanced NoSQL Data Modeling in DynamoDB — What a treat! AWS’s Rick Houlihan is well known for his advanced DynamoDB talks and now he’s on the Serverless Chats podcast talking about the use cases for NoSQL, why single table designs are so powerful, ways to model relational data with GSIs, and, of course, a lot more (there’s even a part 2). A must listen for both NoSQL and DynamoDB users.
Serverless Chats podcast
Demand for Data Engineers Up 50%, Report Says — Dice’s ‘Tech Job Report’ indicates that data engineer and machine learning engineer are two of the fastest growing, in-demand roles in the US (though augmented reality and VR engineers are in the lead, curiously).
Datanami
ML and BI Are Coming Together, Gartner Says — The convergence of machine learning and business intelligence is upon us, claims Gartner, as BI tool makers increasingly are exposing ML capabilities to users. This has been a long running trend IME, but it’s nice to see it acknowledged.
Datanami
📄 And the rest..
▶ Unnesting Arbitrary SQL Queries — The audio is a little ‘distant’ but this is the first in what’s promised to be a long line of database concept videos from CWI Amsterdam (the home of MonetDB). The topic here is finding a generic approach for un-nesting arbitrary SQL queries.
Mark Raasveldt
Ask HN: What Are Some Examples of Good Database Schema Designs? — Someone asks Hacker News for examples of good schemas. There are not a lot of concrete examples (though I recommend Vertabelo’s blog for these) but the discussion is worthwhile.
Hacker News
Introducing SQL VIEW Support in Dolt — Dolt is a novel SQL database with Git-style versioning and distribution and it’s just added support for views.
Aaron Son
ArangoDB Released ArangoML Pipeline Cloud for ML Metadata Management — The fully managed cloud service allows a plug & play experience for any ML pipeline setup. Free Sandbox available.
ArangoDB sponsor
Quipu: An Ancient Database Made From Hair? — An interesting find on Wikipedia that’s made me feel a little better about the database systems I use day to day as in ancient South America they used to use knots tied into hair to store their information :-)
Wikipedia
How to Delete Millions of Rows Fast with SQL (in Oracle) — Deleting a lot of data (permanently) from a table can be time consuming but Oracle Database offers some other ways to approach the problem than just using DELETE.
Chris Saxon (Oracle)
Dealing with Casing When Migrating from SQL Server to PostgreSQL — SQL Server and Postgres have rather different approaches to the use of upper-case letters when naming things.
Hans-Jürgen Schönig
Why Does Dropping a Column Not Reclaim Disk Space? — This is all about PostgreSQL but other database systems adopt similar approaches. In short, it’s not usually efficient to rearrange a table immediately and space can instead be reclaimed over time.
Luca Ferrari
SQL Server Runs Best on Azure. Here’s Why. — This is hardly going to be a surprise given that Microsoft created both Azure and SQL Server and, also unsurprisingly, they’d rather SQL Server users use Azure instead of AWS ;-)
John 'JG' Chirapurath
es2postgres: An ElasticSearch to PostgreSQL Loader — Uses es2csv, xsv, sed and psql to periodically move data from Elasticsearch into Postgres.
Tibor Kiss
web2db: Fetch Web Pages to Archive in SQLite3 Files
Pushkar Paranjpe