Apache Spark as a Compiler: Joining a Billion Rows on your Laptop — A look at how Apache Spark acts as a compiler to optimize queries using whole-stage code generation techniques commonly used in language compilers.

EnterpriseDB Wraps PostgreSQL Into An Enterprise-Grade Suite to Challenge Oracle — EnterpriseDB has brought more tools into its Postgres distro to challenge big commercial DBs.

A Look at the Design of SQLite4 — Described as “just like SQLite3, but with an improved interface and file format”, SQLite4 is going to be “an alternative, not a replacement, for SQLite3.”

TrailDB: An Efficient Library for Storing and Processing Event Data — AdRoll has open sourced a fast, C-based library for compressing and handling time-series event data.

Have you got SQL fingers? — Watch these free SQL Prompt tips videos for SQL writing hints from top SQL Server MVPs. SQL Prompt is the SQL code productivity add-in for SQL Server Management Studio and Visual Studio. Find out how easily you can write SQL.

Unicorn: BigTable, Document and Graph Database with Full Text Search — A simple abstraction of BigTable-like databases such as Cassandra, HBase, and Accumulo that provides an easy-to-use document data model and MongoDB-like API.

Benchmarking Elasticsearch vs InfluxDB for Time-Series Data — Some of the InfluxData team set out to compare the performance and features of InfluxDB and Elasticsearch for common time-series workloads. (Note: InfluxData develops InfluxDB.)

Understanding Outliers with Skew and Kurtosis in SQL — Skewness is a measure of the asymmetry of the probability distribution of a real-valued random variable about its mean, and kurtosis is a measure of the “tailedness” of the same distribution. Confused? Here’s a practical example.

Efficient Pagination in SQL and ElasticSearch — Traditional pagination queries can have a high hidden cost. Here, an interesting technique to make pagination more efficient is explored.

Monitoring MongoDB Performance Metrics — By properly monitoring MongoDB you can quickly spot slowdowns, or pressing resource limitations, and know how to fix performance issues. This series covers WiredTiger but there’s a MMAP edition too.

Scaling to 100M: MySQL is a Better NoSQL — When considering a NoSQL use case, such as key/value storage, MySQL made more sense to Wix in terms of performance, ease of use, and stability.