#303 — May 8, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

Introducing Scylla Open Source 4.0 — Scylla (a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL data store aiming to be the “world’s fastest column-store database”) now provides production-ready lightweight Transactions (LWT), a DynamoDB-compatible API (Alternator), and operator for Kubernetes, and more.

Dor Laor

The Best Medium-Hard Data Analyst SQL Interview Questions — This article begins with a quote: “The first 70% of SQL is pretty straightforward but the remaining 30% can be pretty tricky.” True! This article focuses on the tricky ‘medium-hard’ area that few tutorials venture into.

Zachary Thomas

💻Live Coding: Guide to Grafana 101 - Getting Started with AlertsJoin us on May 20th to see how to use Grafana’s alerting functionality to get notified about anomalies in your data, dig into root causes, and respond to critical issues. Step-by-step demos + tips = cheaper, more flexible monitoring ✅.

Timescale sponsor

TileDB 2.0 and the Future of Data Science — TileDB is an embeddable storage engine focused on working with dense and sparse multi-dimensional arrays. It’s a C++ library with official Python, R, Java and Go integrations, but it can integrate with other database systems too. 2.0 introduces dataframe support, a new API for R, and support for Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage.

Stavros Papadopoulos

Time-Series Compression Algorithms, Explained — Delta-delta encoding, Simple-8b, XOR-based compression, and more - these algorithms aren’t magic, but combined they can save over 90% of storage costs and speed up queries. Here’s how they work.

Joshua Lockerman and Ajay Kulkarni

CockroachDB Creators Raise $87 Million of New Investment — Quite a raise and quite a valuation in these times for the creators of CockroachDB, a popular distributed SQL database.

Cockroach Labs

The Big Cloud Data Boom Gets Even Bigger, Thanks to COVID-19? — It’s not like the cloud was doing badly beforehand, but the pandemic is apparently encouraging companies to virtualize as much of their operations as possible.

Datanami

MongoDB Is Easy. Now Make It Powerful. Free Download for 30 Days. — Using MongoDB Atlas? Studio 3T is the professional GUI and IDE that unlocks the power you need.

Studio 3T sponsor

Speeding Up count(*): Why Not Use max(id) - min(id)? — A warning tale in case you decide to take this shortcut. While you might be able to estimate or fudge a number that’s close, you can’t guarantee sequences will give you an exact, correct answer here.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Using AWS API Gateway to Run Database Queries — API Gateway is commonly used to hook up HTTP endpoints to AWS Lambda functions but did you know it can directly connect to DynamoDB? (Or any AWS service that lets you query over the AWS API, so not RDS.)

Renato Byrro

How to Remain Agile with DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB delivers performance at scale but at a cost to flexibility (particularly early on in the development cycle when your eventual access patterns aren’t always known) – there are some mitigations, however.

Rob Cronin

Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Tooling

pgModeler: A Postgres Database Modeler — An easy way to create and edit database models in a visual way. It’s packaged up as a paid product but is also open source so you can build your own.

Raphael Araújo e Silva

AvionDB: A Decentralised Database with MongoDB-like Developer Interface — An admittedloy ‘alpha stage’ database system built on top of OrbitDB, a serverless, peer-to-peer database that uses IFPS for storage and implements the core decentralized database logic/protocol.

Dappkit

mssql-cli, a CLI Tool to Manage SQL Server, Now on macOS and Linux — mssql-cli is a tool for working with SQL Server from the command line, complete with Intellisense, syntax highlighting, and paging.

Alan Yu (Microsoft)