#328 — October 30, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

TimescaleDB 2.0: A Petabyte-Scale Relational Database for Time-Series — They really go all out to sell TimescaleDB here, but they have reason to be proud of their Postgres-based database which seems to go from strength to strength. v2.0 brings multi-node support, improved licensing (everything’s free), and more (as explained in these tweets).

Ajay Kulkarni and Mike Freedman (Timescale)

▶  The Most Popular Databases: From 2006 to 2020 — A bar chart that shifts and changes over time based on the popularity of different database systems (as determined by the TOPDB index). Not definitive by any means but interesting to see the shifts nonetheless.

YouTube

CYBERTEC Migrator - The Easiest Way from Oracle to Postgres — CYBERTEC Migrator is an easy and user-friendly tool with a visual interface that helps you to efficiently migrate multiple Oracle databases to PostgreSQL. Newest features are close-to-zero downtime migration (CDC) or automatic code rewrite.

CYBERTEC sponsor

Microsoft Overhauls Excel with Live Custom Data Types — A few months ago we mentioned scientists were renaming human genes due to auto-formatting issues in Excel(!) but now Excel is getting more powerful with support for custom live data types.

Tom Warren (The Verge)

▶  How a Man Learning Postgres Exposed 40K Voters Purged By Mistake — A long-time database administrator was running queries on voter data to learn how to use Postgres and stumbled over a significant voter purge error. May you too be able to use your powers of database good to improve democracy :-)

VICE (on YouTube)

AWS Nitro Enclaves: Isolated EC2 Environments to Process Confidential Data — Aimed at AWS users processing ‘highly sensitive data’, Nitro Enclaves lets EC2 users create isolated environments on instances powered by Nitro.

Jeff Barr (AWS)

AWS Step Functions Now Supports Amazon Athena Service Integration — More easily build workflows that query data on your S3 data lake.
Amazon Web Services, Inc.

You Don’t Need a Blockchain, You Need a Time-Series Database? — Apparently time series databases share many properties with enterprise blockchains, so maybe you should try one instead (says a co-creator of QuestDB, a time series database).

Nicolas Hourcard

How Dolt Implemented Pushdown Filters to Make Queries Faster — ‘Pushdown’ is where you move the predicates in a WHERE clause to be under the join, reducing the number of rows you have to examine. Dolt itself is a SQL database that adopts many of Git’s concepts to provide version control primitives over data.

Zach Musgrave

What Is This Mythical Zero Downtime Database Migration to the Cloud? — Join us for a CIO led panel discussion on the issues and risks and the technology available to streamline the experience.

ScaleArc sponsor

Memgraph 1.2 Release - Implementing The Bolt Protocol v4“We thought that it would be interesting to discuss the Bolt Protocol for those of you who are interested in graph databases, and explore what goes into being wire-compatible with another database system.”

Memgraph Team

100,000+ Books in Plain Text Format — This is targeted at people with machine learning use cases but could be ideal as a dataset for all sorts of things. It’s a 37GB download though. There’s also a 100GB file containing source code for similar purposes. It’s all explained in more detail here.

Shawn Presser on Twitter

SMASH: An Efficient Compression Algorithm for Microcontrollers
SEGGER Micro

Running a Scale-Out Database on ARM as a MySQL Alternative — A TiDB case study featuring a customer who chose it to run on ARM-based systems.
PingCAP

Embedded SQL for GnuCOBOL using ocesql — Certainly not a topic we cover every day ;-)
Dan TheMan

💻 Job

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more.

X-Team