---
title: "Understanding database sharding"
publication: "DB Weekly"
issue: 240
published_at: "2019-02-08"
canonical_url: "https://dbweekly.com/issues/240"
---

This week's database news       

#240 — February 8, 2019 

[Read on the Web](https://dbweekly.com/issues/240)   

Database Weekly 

[![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/kixpgozyckjykvko0brd.jpg)](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understanding-database-sharding)  

[Understanding Database Sharding](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/understanding-database-sharding) — Goes over what sharding is, some of its main benefits and drawbacks, and also a few common sharding approaches. 

Mark Drake   

[Recommending Similar Fashion Images with Deep Learning](https://blog.floydhub.com/similar-fashion-images/) — Databases and search features often go hand in hand (e.g. Elasticsearch) but deep learning is having an interesting impact on search by providing a totally different model for it. Stories like this get me wondering about the interesting places where databases and ML collide. 

James Le (FloydHub)   [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/5e99dd98.png)](https://postgresvision.com/) 

[Don’t Miss Postgres Vision 2019](https://postgresvision.com/) — Save the date: June 24 - 26, Boston, MA. 

EnterpriseDB sponsor   

▶[PostgreSQL Goes to Eleven](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ_y5Ej-5vE) — Joe Conway’s talk from FOSDEM digs into some of the history of PostgreSQL and briefly covers what arrived in Postgres 11 and what's set for Postgres 12. _48 minutes._ 

Joe Conway   

[What Queries Does Microsoft's Telemetry Service Run on Your SQL Server?](https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2019/02/what-queries-does-microsofts-telemetry-service-run-on-your-sql-server/) — Since SQL Server 2016, SQL Server instances 'phone home' to MS by default with the results of various queries ran against your database, but what are they? Brent Ozar captured a trace. 

Brent Ozar     

A brief news break..  

[MailChimp's Mandrill Service Experiences Outage Due to PostgreSQL Transaction ID Wraparound](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19086626) — This is something you _really_ need to be aware of if using Postgres at scale and aren't fully in tune with your autovacuuming setup. Sentry experienced [a similar outage in 2015](https://blog.sentry.io/2015/07/23/transaction-id-wraparound-in-postgres.html) and did a full writeup. 

Hacker News   

[Microsoft Invests in Databricks](https://www.datanami.com/2019/02/05/microsoft-invests-in-databricks/) — Databricks is a _“high-flying analytics startup founded by the creators of Apache Spark”_. 

Datanami     

[PostgreSQL at Scale: Database Schema Changes Without Downtime](https://medium.com/braintree-product-technology/postgresql-at-scale-database-schema-changes-without-downtime-20d3749ed680) — Braintree Payments, a division of PayPal, heavily uses Postgres and due to offering payment processing services, zero downtime is a must. Here’s a deep dive into all the things involved in making schema updates without downtime. 

James Coleman   

[New Whitepaper: Choosing a Database Proxy for MySQL and MariaDB](https://severalnines.com/resources/whitepapers/choosing-database-proxy-mysql-and-mariadb?utm_campaign=DB_Speed_Campaign_JAN19&utm_content=dbweekly&utm_medium=Paid_Search&utm_source=banner) — What is a proxy and why do you need it to achieve high availability for your database? 

Severalnines sponsor   

[Implementing Versioning and Audit Trails with SQL Server Temporal Tables and .NET Core](https://rossjayjones.github.io/dotnetcore/2018/11/13/first-class-versioning-and-auditing-with-sql-temporal-tables.html) — When working with personal or otherwise valuable data, it can become essential to see who is making changes to it, when those changes are, and _what_ they were. 

Ross Jay Jones   

[mongofluxd: Real-Time Sync from MongoDB into InfluxDB](https://github.com/rwynn/mongofluxd) 

Ryan Wynn  

🐦 Spotted on Twitter  

['We Use SQLite Mounted on a Shared Volume in WAL Mode' (To Communicate Between Containers)](https://twitter.com/rbranson/status/1090735760515379200) — I’m _really_ looking forward to the blog post to follow on this interesting approach for container communication. Database as data_bus?_ 

Rick Branson on Twitter         

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