Many SQL Perf Problems Stem from “Unnecessary, Mandatory Work” — Many ORMs and query builders will do wasteful things like SELECT * by default, but it can go a lot further than that.

Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL: Fully Managed Postgres on GCP — A beta release but it’ll be available for all Google Cloud users on Monday (March 13).

MongoDB's Hosted MongoDB Service Gets A Free Tier — Atlas is MongoDB’s own MongoDB-as-a-service offering, and now has a free ‘starting point’ tier that provides a 3 node cluster with 512MB storage.

Performance Dashboard for Redis — RedisMonitor's interactive visual map of your Redis memory makes it easy to find out why. Starts at just $7 per month.

How Modern SQL Databases Come Up with Algorithms You Never Dreamed Of — A 50 minute talk from an SQL superfan on the beauty of how SQL-based databases figure out how to obtain the desired results we declare.

Acra: An Open Source Postgres Protection Suite — Tools to secure Postgres databases in distributed environments. Selectively encrypt sensitive records and detect potential intrusions and SQL injections. Mongo and MySQL support promised soon.

MySQL Backup Backdoor Vulnerability Revealed — By crafting a malicious table name, an attacker can execute arbitrary SQL queries and shell commands if the dump file is imported.

What's In the Pipeline for Apache Spark? — Apache Spark creator Matei Zaharia promises Spark will see a variety of new features and enhancements this year, including a standard binary data format.