Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) Now Available — Now in production form across five AWS regions, QLDB is a ‘ledger’ style database for tracking all committed changes to a dataset in a guaranteed and verifiably accurate way.

Jeff Barr

Scylla Alternator: An Open Source DynamoDB-Compatible API for Scylla — Alternator is an open source project that brings DynamoDB compatibility to Scylla, a Cassandra-inspired distributed NoSQL store. The ScyllaDB company themselves have also just raised $25m.

ScyllaDB

Free O’Reilly Book: Graph Algorithms — Building predictive models or forecasting real-world behavior? Download this free O'Reilly book on using graph algorithms in Apache Spark and Neo4j with 20+ practical examples.

Neo4j sponsor

Procella: Unifying Serving and Analytical Data at YouTube — Adrian Colyer’s analysis of compsci papers is always good to read, but in this case he’s going big with the claim that “what we’re looking at here could well be the future of data processing” and Google’s already using Procella in production.

the morning paper

SQL Concepts: From A to Z — A brief revisiting of twenty-six, unsurprisingly, database concepts spanning the alphabet.

Helen Anderson

A Technical Introduction to MemSQL — A brief technical introduction to the MemSQL database, a distributed, in-memory, SQL DBMS.

John Sherwood (MemSQL)

Netlify Unveils a FaunaDB Add-on for Its Hosting Platform — Netlify, very much an up and coming modern site hosting platform, has rolled out a FaunaDB add-on to let its users seamlessly plug a globally distributed database into their site.

Netlify

Lead Security Engineer — Make an impact as our first Security Engineer, focusing on driving innovation & best practices around our cloud security efforts.

Cockroach Labs

Find a DB job through Vettery — Make a free profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers.

Vettery

Using DISTINCT ON in Non-PostgreSQL Databases — DISTINCT ON is a neat feature in Postgres’s SQL dialect for selecting the first rows that distinctly match a variety of conditions. (We even wrote about it in issue 321 of our Postgres newsletter).

Lukas Eder

eBook: Best Practices for Optimizing Postgres Query Performance — Learn how to get a 3x performance improvement on your Postgres database and 500x reduced data loaded from disk in this free pganalyze eBook.

pganalyze sponsor

Using MySQL as a Cache Layer for BigQuery with Cube.js — An interesting idea around using BigQuery as a slow ‘single source of truth’ but with MySQL as a ‘caching layer’ for sub-second responses for certain queries from a Cube.js dashboard.

Artyom Keydunov

What is an SQL 'Relation'? — A short but sweet introduction to the concept of what a ‘relation’ is. It’s not just the persistent tables you’re familiar with but “the truth is that any SQL query defines a new relation.” Dmitri has also released some related articles this week reintroducing us to joins and aggregates.

Dimitri Fontaine

Hot Patching SQL Server Engine in Azure SQL Database — A (very) technical, but interesting(!), explanation of how the Azure team manage to hot patch live, running versions of the SQL Server engine used by Azure SQL Database to keep things up to date without affecting customers. Enjoy this as a geeky story and not because there are any solid takeaways.

Hans Olav Norheim (Microsoft)

Waltz: A Distributed Write-Ahead Log — Initially designed to be a ledger of transactions for the WePay system but now generalized for broader use cases of distributed systems that require serializable consistency.

wepay

nanoSQL 2: A Universal 'Database Layer' for Client, Server and Mobile — Basically an abstraction for any JavaScript developers who want a database in their app. It can use numerous actual databases behind the scenes, including localStorage, IndexedDB, RocksDB, Redis, DynamoDB, ScyllaDB and SQLite. It claims to be like “Lego™ for databases”.

Scott Lott

Poli: An Easy-to-Use SQL Reporting App Built for SQL Lovers — Java-based and can connect to any database supported via JDBC.

Zhonglu