--- title: "Can Mean Girls explain the Raft consensus algorithm?" publication: "DB Weekly" issue: 325 published_at: "2020-10-09" canonical_url: "https://dbweekly.com/issues/325" --- Plus more database news, views, and links. #325 — October 9, 2020 [Read on the Web](https://dbweekly.com/issues/325) Database Weekly [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/mdjpr0sp64idoxxtkerz.jpg)](https://www.holistics.io/blog/quel-vs-sql/) [A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival](https://www.holistics.io/blog/quel-vs-sql/) — A short story about SQL’s rival: Michael Stonebraker’s storied query language, [QUEL.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages) Allegedly Oracle’s Larry Ellison said: _“Maybe QUEL is better than SQL. Maybe French is better than English? It didn’t matter: English and SQL were going to win.”_ Cedric Chin [Raft Is So Fetch: The Raft Consensus Algorithm Explained Through _Mean Girls_](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/raft-is-so-fetch/) — If you don’t like playful explanations, move on because this will get confusing fast, but if _Mean Girls_ means something to you, this is a noble attempt to make the Raft consensus algorithm more relatable(!) Mikael Austin (CockroachDB) [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/fa6599dc.jpg)](https://ravendb.net/articles/building-application-with-net-core-and-ravendb-nosql-database) [Creating a Bug-Tracker with .NET Core + RavenDB NoSQL Database (YABT Series)](https://ravendb.net/articles/building-application-with-net-core-and-ravendb-nosql-database) — A series of articles on building an enterprise solution with the .NET Core and RavenDB, showing how various NoSQL DB features play out all the way through the API to the UI. RavenDB sponsor [UK Government Misplaces COVID-19 Results Due to _Excel_Limitation](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988) — The BBC put it mildly by saying: _“The decision to use a spreadsheet format that dates back to the 1980s has proved to be unwise.”_ This is a great example, however, of end users using what _feels_ like the right tool for them but without it actually suiting the use case (a common issue with data systems in general, IMHO). BBC News **⚡️ Quick bytes:** - AWS has [added Redis 6.0 compatibility](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-redis-6-compatibility-for-amazon-elasticache/) to its ElastiCache service. - [Memgraph 1.1 is out](https://memgraph.com/blog/memgraph-1-1-benchmarks) boasting 50% better memory usage and higher throughput. - [Some updates](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-leads-way-in-machine-learning/) on SageMaker, AWS's 'machine learning in the cloud' service, including a price reduction. - 🥳 Excel [turned 35](https://twitter.com/msexcel/status/1311433151235883011) last week. [How Stream Monkey Serverlessly Migrated 1.58 Billion Elasticsearch Documents](https://blog.streammonkey.com/how-we-serverlessly-migrated-1-58-billion-elasticsearch-documents-33ad3d0d7c4f) — Stream Monkey has 2.1TB of data stored in Elasticsearch and uses it as part of its real-time stats dashboard. They needed to make a big Elasticsearch upgrade (which included updating the underlying schema) and came up with a serverless solution to the problem. Nicholas Ionata [The Database is on Fire](http://acko.net/blog/the-database-is-on-fire/) — An interesting story and thoughts on the state of real-time databases, specifically Google’s takes on the matter via Firebase and Firestore or, as the author puts it: _“Totally Fair and Unbiased comparison of two closely related Real-Time Database Products By Google™”_ Steven Wittens [Best-Practices on How to Speed Up Your Postgres Queries. Free eBook](https://pganalyze.com/ebooks/optimizing-postgres-query-performance?utm_source=DBWeeklySecondary10092020) — We share our learnings from helping companies like Atlassian, Robinhood, and others speed up their queries. pganalyze sponsor [Migrating from mLab to MongoDB Atlas](https://chenhuijing.com/blog/migrating-mlab-to-mongodb-atlas/) — And why would you need to do this? Well, MongoDB acquired mLab in 2018 and are requesting [everyone migrate.](https://docs.mlab.com/mlab-to-atlas/) Chen Hui Jing [Tips for Upgrading from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8](https://severalnines.com/database-blog/tips-for-upgrading-mysql-5-7-to-mysql-8) Krzysztof Ksiazek (Severalnines) ⚙️ Code and Tools [CG/SQL: Easy, Accurate SQLite Code Generation](https://engineering.fb.com/open-source/cg-sql/) — A project from Facebook that compiles stored procedures written in a variant of T-SQL into C code that uses SQLite. [GitHub repo.](https://github.com/facebookincubator/CG-SQL) Rico Mariani (Facebook Engineering) [Arctype: A Desktop SQL Client for Postgres and MySQL](https://arctype.com/) — When I saw someone [tweet](https://twitter.com/Bensign/status/1312427070383886338) that this is the ‘most beautiful client I’ve used’, I had to take a look at this. spreadsheet-style data editing. Arctype [q: Run SQL on CSV or TSV Files](https://harelba.github.io/q/) — A perennially useful utility. Harel Ben-Attia 💻 Jobs [DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote)](https://x-team.com/join/?utm_source=cooperpress&utm_medium=email-ad&utm_campaign=db) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more. X-Team ❓ QUEL vs SQL If you found the top feature about QUEL interesting, you might also be intrigued to see how QUEL and SQL compare at a basic query level and the Wikipedia entry provides a neat table: [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/v1602239122/cumzs2pqepxf8chb2ops.png)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUEL_query_languages) A **[Cooperpress](https://cooperpress.com/)** publication. [Change your email address](https://dbweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) or[Stop getting this newsletter](https://dbweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*) © Cooper Press Ltd · Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom