5 Ways to Better Understand SQL by Adding Optional Parentheses — Even if you’re an expert, SQL can sometimes seem like a bit of a messy beast and identifying which elements of syntax have which behavior can be tricky, especially compared to other languages. Lukas provides some pointers for examining SQL’s behavior by using parentheses.

Lukas Eder

Microsoft Unveils a Free Tier for Azure Cosmos DB — A pretty good deal here if you want to kick the tires of Azure’s Cosmos DB, a powerful multi-model database that supports numerous APIs out of the box (including SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Gremlin). For free you get 5GB of storage and 400 RU/s (Request Units per second) which vaguely correlates to either 400KB/sec of reading or 80KB/se of writing.

Microsoft

Why Baidu Migrated Off Sharded MySQL — Delivering reliable performance to nearly 1 billion users while managing hundreds of MySQL shards was an operational nightmare for Baidu’s engineering team, so they turned to CockroachDB.

Cockroach Labs sponsor

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB Now Generally Available — A tool (for both macOS and Windows) to help you build and visualize high-performance data models and accelerate the development of DynamoDB operations.

Amazon Web Services

clickhouse-local: Fast Analytic Processing for Local Files — Clickhouse is an increasingly popular open source column store engine and it’s very easy to setup and run. However, it does require a server, but the clickhouse-local utility makes it possible for you to feed in data and perform a query locally all in one go without having to deploy a server at all.

ClickHouse Documentation

Why Graph Will Win — Of course the co-creator of a graph database is going to say “20 years from now, non-graph databases will be niche and legacy applications” but Kevin has some interesting insights nonetheless 😄

Kevin Feeney

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Work with the world's leading brands, from anywhere. Travel the world while being part of the most energizing community of developers.

X-Team

Full Stack Engineer — Expensify seeks a self-driven individual passionate about making code effective, with an understanding of algorithms and design patterns.

Expensify

SQL's DISTINCT Is Not A Function — Lukas continues to dish out the SQL knowledge.

Lukas Eder

10 Tips to Optimize Your DynamoDB Costs — Optimizing cost for DynamoDB needs a different approach than what you might be used to.

Rafal Wilinski

5 Query Pushdowns for Distributed SQL and How They Differ from a Traditional RDBMS — A pushdown is an optimization to improve the performance of a SQL query by moving its processing as close to the data as possible.

Karthik Ranganathan (Yugabyte)

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

From “Days to Seconds”: Inside Jobvite’s SQL Server to Amazon Aurora Migration — A popular recruiting software company migrated from using self-managed SQL Server instances to AWS’s Aurora (in its MySQL variant) and found numerous advantages.

Matt Asay

A Quick Interview with PostgreSQL's Joe Conway — Joe, a long time PostgreSQL committer, has been working with Postgres almost solidly for twenty years, so he’s got a lot to share.

Andreas Scherbaum

Querious 3: The Best MySQL Tool for macOS? — A commercial MySQL client for macOS that certainly looks very attractive and feature packed.

Araelium

A Docker Image for Non-Blocking MySQL and MariaDB Backups

Wolfgang Gassler

distributed-dataset: A Distributed Data Processing Framework in Pure Haskell — Inspired by Apache Spark.

Utku Demir