---
title: "An Introduction to Druid, Interactive Analytics at Big Scale"
publication: "DB Weekly"
issue: 220
published_at: "2018-09-07"
canonical_url: "https://dbweekly.com/issues/220"
---

This week's database news       

#220 — September 7, 2018 

[Read on the Web](https://dbweekly.com/issues/220)   

Database Weekly  

[Select Star SQL: An Interactive SQL Tutorial](https://selectstarsql.com/) — Want to get a bit better at SQL? This interactive online guide will give you some practical experience and is oriented, intriguingly, around querying a dataset of death row inmates.. 

Select Star SQL   

[An Introduction to Druid, Interactive Analytics at Big Scale](https://blog.zysset.me/introduction-to-druid/) — Druid is an Apache-incubated high performance analytics data store for event-driven data (or, as the author describes it, _“a real-time columnar timeseries database on steroids”_). 

Florian Zysset   [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/f86aab91.jpg)](https://www.influxdata.com/blog/the-most-frequently-asked-questions-a-guide-for-the-overly-eager-new-influxdb-user/) 

[The Most Frequently Asked Questions: A Guide for the Overly Eager New InfluxDB User](https://www.influxdata.com/blog/the-most-frequently-asked-questions-a-guide-for-the-overly-eager-new-influxdb-user/) — This blog contains the most FAQ when you’re getting started with InfluxDB, the fastest growing open source TSDB. 

InfluxData sponsor   

['I Don’t Want to Learn Your Garbage Query Language'](https://erikbern.com/2018/08/30/i-dont-want-to-learn-your-garbage-query-language.html) — _“This is a bit of a rant but I really don’t like software that invents its own query language.”_ This opinion piece fuelled [an extensive discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17890760) on Hacker News. 

Erik Bernhardsson   

[Flink Delivers ACID Transactions on Streaming Data](https://www.datanami.com/2018/09/04/flink-delivers-acid-transactions-on-streaming-data/) — The folks behind Apache Flink, an open source stream processing framework, just delivered something you may not have realized you needed: ACID guarantees in a stream processing framework. 

Datanami   

[SQream DB 3.0 Boasts 15x Speedup for Its GPU Data Warehouse](https://www.datanami.com/2018/09/05/sqream-boasts-15x-speedup-for-gpu-data-warehouse/) — [SQream](https://sqream.com/) is a commercial, GPU-based data warehouse system aimed at bringing a relatively budget option to the multi-terabyte analytics market. 

Datanami   

[Integrating MongoDB and Amazon Kinesis for Intelligent, Durable Streams](https://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/integrating-mongodb-and-amazon-kinesis-for-intelligent-durable-streams) — A tutorial looking at the MongoDB Stitch setup needed to both durably store data on MongoDB Atlas while simultaneously pushing it to Amazon Kinesis to perform stream-oriented analytics. 

Michael Lynn   

[ArangoDB 3.4 Release Candidate 1 Released: What's New?](https://www.arangodb.com/2018/09/rc1-arangodb-3-4-whats-new/) — ArangoDB is a highly available multi-model NoSQL database & 3.4 introduces [ArangoSearch](https://www.arangodb.com/2018/04/arangosearch-architecture-overview/), a search layer, and suppor for GeoJSON and Google’s S2 Geo Index. 

ArangoDB   

[Coming to Postgres 11: Parallel CREATE INDEX](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/postgresql-parallel-create-index-for-better-performance/) — Being able to create indexes in parallel is a significant development. 

Hans-Jürgen Schönig   

[How to Download the Stack Overflow Database for SQL Server](https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/10/how-to-download-the-stack-overflow-database-via-bittorrent/) — The latest dump expands to a 304GB(!) SQL Server 2008 database. There’s also a smaller ‘laptop’ build. An ideal dataset to stress or test SQL Server with. 

Brent Ozar   

[Find the Next Non-NULL Row in a Series With SQL](https://blog.jooq.org/2018/09/03/find-the-next-non-null-row-in-a-series-with-sql/) 

Lukas Eder   

[Migrating a Standalone PostgreSQL Instance to Amazon Aurora](https://medium.com/@paveltyk/migrating-postgresql-standalone-instance-to-aurora-amazon-rds-3c038cfd2517) 

Pavel Tsiukhtsiayeu   

[Break Free from Oracle](https://www.enterprisedb.com/database-compatibility-technology-oracle) — Reduce database costs by 80% or more. 

EnterpriseDB sponsor   

[Spotify Open Sources 'cstar', Its Cassandra Orchestration Tool](https://labs.spotify.com/2018/09/04/introducing-cstar-the-spotify-cassandra-orchestration-tool-now-open-source/) — At 3000 nodes large, Spotify needed some tooling to help it manage its Cassandra cluster. This tool lets them (and now you) run arbitrary scripts on all hosts in a cluster in a “topology aware” fashion. 

Emilio Del Tessandoro (Spotify)   

[Sqorn: A Fast, Composable JavaScript SQL Query Builder](https://github.com/lusakasa/sqorn) — Uses a functional style that models query compilation as a series of transformations. [Full tutorial here.](https://sqorn.org/docs/tutorial.html) 

Sufyan Dawoodjee   

[Redis 5.0 RC5 Released](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/redis-db/d1rVmakHqbA/VO4DfUMEDQAJ) 

Salvatore Sanfilippo         

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