#292 — February 21, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

IRedis: A Terminal Client for Redis with Auto-Completion and Syntax Highlighting — The redis-cli tool is pretty basic, but IRedis takes things up a notch with syntax coloring, reverse searching of previous commands, better display of query results, and more.

赖信涛

Discussing the Cloud Database Landscape with Suphatra Rufo — A conversation with Couchbase’s Suphatra Rufo about how enterprises are migrating data to the cloud, why the cloud database market is shifting to NoSQL (.. it is?), and hybrid database strategies.

Serverless Chats

Python Dominates in the Data Space, Usage Survey Confirms — Data scientists, machine learning developers and data engineers are (continuing to) turn decisively to the Python programming language, according to a new study.

Datanami

Live Webinar: Time-Series for Developers — What is time-series data and how do you use it in your projects and systems? Join us on Feb 26 to see what you need to know about time-series data, complete with step-by-step coding examples, expert tips, and more.

Timescale sponsor

Amazon and Commercial Open Source in the Cloud: It's Complicated — If you’ve been reading DB Weekly for a while, you’ll know about the AWS vs MongoDB tension and other areas where AWS has seemingly stood on the toes of ‘open source companies’, but is it all as it seems? Some worthwhile analysis here.

George Anadiotis (ZDNet)

Storage in the Exabyte Era — Databases aren’t just dependent on algorithms and code, storage is a pressing factor too. As a petabyte (~1000 terabytes) begins to look tame by some data systems’ standards, how is the industry adapting to a world where exabyte workloads could become commonplace?

Datanami

usql: A Universal CLI for Databases — A CLI tool (written in Go) for working with Postgres, SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite3, RedShift, CockroachDB, Cassandra, and many more. This feels a bit like a database Swiss Army knife.

Kenneth Shaw

Quick bytes:

  • DataRow, the creators of a tool for exploring data via Amazon Redshift, has been acquired by the mothership AWS. Congratulations to them.
  • You can now restore Amazon DynamoDB table backups as new tables in other AWS regions. Handy!
  • Open Raven, a new enterprise data security platform, has emerged from 'stealth' and offers a way to map cloud and on-prem data stores for management from a single place.
  • Data warehouse, data lake, data pond.. now? Roadhouse! Lakehouse! It's a cross between a warehouse and a lake.

📄 And the rest..

Isolation Repeatable Reads in Postgres vs MySQL — By default, Postgres and MySQL use different levels of isolation within transactions. Within a running transaction, Postgres will see changes made by other transactions once committed, whereas MySQL uses “repeatable read” where the results of a query remain consistent throughout a transaction. There’s a bit more to it than that, though, and this post deftly shows us how it all works.

Daniel Vérité

The Experience of Migrating to CockroachDB from Postgres — We love Postgres, but we love a story even more, so it’s interesting to hear about the experiences this engineer had when shifting from Postgres to CockroachDB (for the reason of better “out of the box support for high availability”).

Karl Seguin

Best Practices for Secondary Indexes with DynamoDB — It’s probably obvious now that I’m a sucker for a good advanced DynamoDB tutorial and this fits the bill rather well digging into the powerful world of DynamoDB’s secondary indexes.

Alex DeBrie

Webinar: Next-Gen Open Source & The Future of Data with Spencer Kimball — How will open source survive and evolve in the cloud era? And what will databases look like in 2030? Tune in Feb 27.

Cockroach Labs sponsor

Finding the Moving Average From Heterogeneous Data Sources Using Apache Kafka, MongoDB and R — It’s a long title, but a solid tutorial about using the new MongoDB Connector for Apache Kafka to build data pipelines by way of a practical example.

Robert Walters

Composing Cohort Queries in BigQuery Using HyperLogLog++ — Probabilistic cardinality estimation to the rescue yet again.

Ilker Cam

How to Render the Mandelbrot Set in SQLite in 1 Query — A bit of fun, but what a query.

SQLite Team

A Hidden Gem in MySQL: MyRocks — MyRocks is an alternative RocksDB/LevelDB-based storage engine available in MySQL and considered “a hidden gem” by the author.

Alkin Tezuysal

Using AWS Lambda to Create a MongoDB Connection Proxy — While AWS Aurora has the Data API for making queries over HTTP, MongoDB does not, but it’s possible to use AWS Lambda to rig up a similar mechanism with solid results. I suspect this could be replicated for other database systems too.

Adrian Smijulj

Using Redis as an External Scoring Source for Elasticsearch

Itamar Syn-Hershko

In Loving Memory of Strictly-Typed Schemas

Prateek Sanyal

🐦 Seen on Twitter

Amen!