#306 — May 29, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

SQLite 3.32.0 Released — The world’s most popular database takes another baby step forward:

  • Support for faster ‘approximate’ ANALYZE queries.
  • A iif() SQL function which acts like an “IF” in other languages, or like CASE WHEN X THEN Y ELSE Z END in more traditional SQL.
  • You can now include up to 32766 parameters in a query, up from the previous maximum of 999. (I’d like to see some code doing this!)

SQLite

Ask HN: Do You Still Use MongoDB? — This Hacker News discussion really took off. Of course, a lot of criticisms of MongoDB here but plenty of plus points too. Well worth a skim if you’re using MongoDB or have been considering it.

Hacker News

Free eBook: How to Get a 3x Performance Improvement on Your Postgres Database — Learn our best practices for optimizing Postgres query performance for customers like Atlassian and how to reduce data loaded from disk by 500x.

pganalyze sponsor

▶  The Trouble with Databases — Google’s Jaana Dogan recently wrote a very popular article about what she wished more developers knew about databases and here she reflects on these topics and more in a solid hour with the Go Time podcast crew. Worthwhile weekend listening.

Go Time Podcast

TimescaleDB, A PostgreSQL-Based Time-Series Database, Now Free — Timescale are making their multi-node time-series database on PostgreSQL available for free (it’s ‘source available’). This post digs into why.

Timescale

Cloud Misconfigurations Spur DB ‘Repatriation’ — Cloud database misconfigurations are among the fastest growing sources of data breaches over the last five years, and apparently this is fuelling a wave of ‘repatriations’ of data processing to in-house clouds or on-premise systems.

Datanami

Using Amazon Kendra to Help Answer 10th Standard Science Questions for My DaughterKendra is a new AWS service for querying data using natural language and it’s very much “enterprise” given how much it costs.. Nonetheless, if you want to use it to help with your kid’s homework, it’s totally possible.

Mani

▶  A Practical-ish Introduction to Data Science — This is pretty high level but extremely accessible and well worth the time if the terms ‘data science’ and ‘machine learning’ leave you scratching your head half the time.

Mark West

How We Reduced The AWS Costs of Our Streaming Data Pipeline by 67% — Basic AWS optimization work, to an extent, although a key saving was in switching jobs from running on AWS Glue (AWS’s managed ETL service) to doing things more manually on Fargate.

Taloflow

▶  What Developers Are Doing with Postgres and MySQL on Azure — A 30 minute talk and discussion from last week’s virtual Microsoft Build conference. Quite high level.

Andrea Lam and Samay Sharma

▶  How to Select The 'Right' Database — When “database” means MariaDB or MySQL, in this case. He also touches briefly on why you might choose MariaDB against Postgres.. I find the thinking a little odd, but nonetheless there are lots of interesting thoughts and insights into the MariaDB/MySQL world here.

Kaj Arnö

💼 Job

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

🛠 Tools and Systems

Announcing MemSQL 7.1 — MemSQL’s flavor of SQL has been extended to support more common use cases. Backups can now be made incrementally to cloud services. Broader index support and faster failback/recovery round out the new features here. MemSQL is a performance-oriented relational SQL database, and not to be confused with MemGraph, say.

Floyd Smith (MemSQL)

✨Live Webinar: Guide to Grafana: Templates, Sharing & BeyondJoin us on June 17 to get up & running with interactive, reusable Grafana dashboard templates that you can clone, share w/ teammates & more.

Timescale sponsor

MS Makes Microsoft Connector for Oracle Generally Available — Enables the ability to export data from and load data into Oracle (20, 11, 12c or 18c) data sources in an SSIS package.

Microsoft

Introducing Athenadriver: An Open Source Amazon Athena Database Driver for Go — Amazon Athena is a service for doing analysis directly on data in S3 using standard SQL. Uber has created a Go driver that is database/sql compatible.

Uber Engineering

🐦 Will we still be using SQL in 300 years' time? Maybe!

“[There are] 2 types of people - those who think.. Star Trek: Discovery is dumb and stupid for including a reference to SQL “300 years in the future" [and those who] think SQL still being used in 300 years is evidence Star Trek is a hard SF & a horrifyingly accurate portrayal of the future.” #

Dan Hon, Director of Content at Code for America.

P.S. Yes, our stock photography site of choice really had that SQLite image we used at the top there. I figured we should be the only person to ever download and use it, so there we go 😂