#254 — May 17, 2019

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

Huawei Launches GaussDB, an 'AI-Backed Database' — The Chinese company better known for its cellphones has entered the enterprise business market with a database aiming to ‘redefine data infrastructure through a Data + Intelligence strategy’. Think self-turning, self-diagnosing and self-healing.. all concepts we can expect to see more of in databases over the next few years.

TechCrunch

Introducing Crux: An Open-Source Bitemporal Database — Built for efficient bitemporal indexing of schemaless documents, Crux can use LMDB or RocksDB for its store. It’s built in Clojure and comes with Java and Clojure APIs. GitHub repo.

Jon Pither

The Essentials of Database Scalability — What's the best way to scale your database? The short answer is: it depends. Learn about the pros and cons of vertically scaling your database and horizontally scaling it.

Turbonomic sponsor

How to Try Out the Cutting Edge Version of PostgreSQL — We frequently link interesting posts about upcoming features in Postgres, many of which have already been baked into the project’s core source code. But if you want to play with the very latest, experimental version of Postgres, how do you do it?

Hubert depesz Lubaczewski

SQLFlow: An Attempt at Bridging Data and AI by Extending SQL — There seems to be a theme this week - bringing AI and databases together. SQLFlow currently supports MySQL and TensorFlow and extends SQL to support performing AI/ML relating tasks like training models. Here’s a deeper look at the design.

Yi Wang et al.

Taxi Company Issued €160,754 Fine for GDPR Violation — News about GDPR enforcement has been pretty thin on the ground, but here a Danish taxi company has received a significant fine (approximately $180k) for keeping customer data around for longer than strictly necessary (possibly through poor normalization).

Compliance Junction

⏩ IN BRIEF:

💻 Jobs

Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Invoca (Santa Barbara, CA or Remote) — Join our team of Operations Engineers deploying code to our production SaaS platform & public cloud infrastructure multiple times per day.

Invoca

Find a DB Job on Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📒 Tutorials and Stories

The Origin Story of Data Science — Back in 1962, John Tukey (who coined the term ‘bit’) “outlined a new science about learning from data”.

Pierre Mary

Going Underground: Graphing and Pathfinding London Tube Lines — A graph database, such as Neo4j, is a good match for working with networks like London’s underground train system.

Joe Depeau (Neo4j)

Improving OLAP Workload Performance for Postgres with ClickHouse DatabaseClickHouse is an open source column-oriented DBMS focused on rapidly producing analytical data reports.

Ibrar Ahmed

Getting Started with Azure Database for PostgreSQL — Want to use Postgres without worrying about managing your database? See how easy it is to get started.

Microsoft Azure sponsor

The Struggles of an Open Source Maintainer — The creator of Redis reflects on the problems that rear their ugly heads when an open source project becomes popular.

Salvatore Sanfilippo

Operationalizing Postgres Database Health Checks using SQL Notebooks — A look at a technique in Azure Data Studio (yes, Azure users only, I’m afraid) for creating interactive “notebooks” of SQL queries for monitoring a Postgres installation.

Parikshit Savjani (Microsoft)

How To Notify Clients of Cosmos DB Changes with Azure SignalR and Azure Functions

Jason Roberts

🛠 Code and Tools

RadonDB: A MySQL-Compatible Fully Distributed Cloud Database — A ‘cloud-native’ database supporting distributed transactions, automatic table sharding, and as of this week, distributed joins. Written in Go.

RadonDB

TXR: A Programming Language for Convenient Data Munging — It makes an interesting claim: “If a program is significantly clearer and shorter in another language, that is considered a bug in TXR.” You can see some examples here. It’s not for me, but it might be for you.

Kaz Kylheku