--- title: "A big SQLite release" publication: "DB Weekly" issue: 346 published_at: "2021-03-19" canonical_url: "https://dbweekly.com/issues/346" --- Plus what do DBAs do, a new S3 feature, and travelling salespeople. | #346 — March 19, 2021 [Read on the Web](https://dbweekly.com/issues/346) Database Weekly [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60/rsx8jfitgyxhahnjdmox.jpg)](https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2021/03/what-does-a-database-administrator-actually-do/) [What Does a Database Administrator Actually Do?](https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2021/03/what-does-a-database-administrator-actually-do/) — Brent is a big name in the SQL Server world in particular so it’s neat to get some insights from him on the 20th anniversary of his popular site. Brent Ozar [What’s New in SQLite 3.35](https://antonz.org/sqlite-3-35/) — Quite a lot, it turns out. I’m always inspired by not just how useful SQLite is but how actively developed it is too. 3.35 introduces a plethora of mathematical functions, the ability to drop columns on tables, materialized CTEs, and a `RETURNING` clause for returning useful values from `DELETE`, `INSERT`, and `UPDATE` queries. The [official release notes](https://sqlite.org/releaselog/3_35_0.html) are also available. Anton Zhiyanov [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/958348a7.png)](https://fauna.com/postgres?utm_source=DBWeekly&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=CooperPress_Newsletters_2021) [An Operations-Free, Scalable & Flexible Postgres Alternative](https://fauna.com/postgres?utm_source=DBWeekly&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=CooperPress_Newsletters_2021) — Fauna combines the operational integrity and relational modeling of Postgres with an interface and architecture that fits better with modern app development in the cloud. The goodness of Postgres without its operational bottlenecks - [Learn more about Fauna](https://fauna.com/postgres?utm_source=DBWeekly&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=CooperPress_Newsletters_2021%20). Fauna sponsor [Introducing Amazon S3 Object Lambda: Process Data During Retrieval](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-s3-object-lambda-use-your-code-to-process-data-as-it-is-being-retrieved-from-s3/) — For S3’s 15th birthday it’s got a new feature! _S3 Object Lambda_ seamlessly places Lambda functions in between S3 objects and whatever is requesting those objects so you can do processing and transformations on the fly. _(This is basically an alternative approach to just using Lambda and working with S3 that way round.)_ Danilo Poccia (AWS) [Amazon Makes ARM-Based Instances Generally Available for Aurora](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/03/achieve-up-to-35-percent-better-price-performance-with-amazon-aurora-using-new-graviton2-instances/) — AWS Graviton2 processors are ARM-based CPUs that are custom built by AWS themselves and seem to offer much improved performance at a lower cost (a la Apple and their new M1 chips). This announcement brings the perf and cost improvements to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL (and MySQL) users. Amazon Web Services Quick Bits - Google Cloud Spanner has launched [point-in-time recovery.](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/continuous-data-protection-here-for-spanner-with-pitr) - TerminusDB has closed [a €3.6m seed round.](https://terminusdb.com/blog/2021/03/15/terminusdb-closes-a-eur-3-6-million-seed-round/) TerminusDB is an upstart provider of an open source knowledge graph style database system. - AWS has a new [EC2 X2gd instance type](https://www.datanami.com/this-just-in/aws-announces-general-availability-of-amazon-ec2-x2gd-instances-powered-by-graviton2-processors/) which gives you ARM-based Graviton2 power with up to 1TB of memory and 3.8TB of local NVMe storage. Good potential for data workloads here. [Tackling the Travelling Salesperson Problem with PostGIS and pgRouting](https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/traveling-salesman-problem-with-postgis-and-pgrouting/) — The [Travelling Salesperson Problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem) is the problem of routing between a variety of points visiting each only once and in as short a distance as possible. This post tackles the problem in a PostGIS powered Postgres database using [pgRouting’s](https://pgrouting.org/) extensions. Florian Nadler [Building a Postgres-Backed “Data Lake” for Reporting Purposes](https://tech.fretlink.com/build-your-own-data-lake-for-reporting-purposes/) — Most companies make data driven decisions and querying data warehouses (or ‘lakes’, when the data is less formally structured) is a common activity. This extensive tale covers how one company approached it using Postgres and FDWs in an intriguing manner. Paul Bonaud [Guide for Windows Users: Tune PostgreSQL & EDB Postgres Advanced Server](https://info.enterprisedb.com/Whitepaper_PostgreSQL-EPAS-Guide-Windows-users.html?utm_source=Cooperpress&utm_medium=ad) — Download this guide to get a set of recommendations to configure and tune PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres Advanced Server. EDB sponsor [Export and Analyze Amazon DynamoDB Data in an Amazon S3 Data Lake in Parquet Format](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/export-and-analyze-amazon-dynamodb-data-in-an-amazon-s3-data-lake-in-apache-parquet-format/) — The benefit of having data exported to S3 in Parquet format is it opens up a lot of extra analytical possibilities such as with Athena, Redshift, SageMaker or local big data tools of your choosing. Ali and Mandal (AWS) [How to Inspect Redis Commands with `MONITOR`](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/inspect-redis-commands-using-monitor) — Take a look at a live log of all commands run on your Redis server. thoughtbot [Analyzing Python Package Downloads in BigQuery](https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/analyzing-python-package-downloads-bigquery) — Dig into trends in Python package downloads with BigQuery’s new public dataset. Leigha Jarett (Google) [Uber's Journey Toward Better Data Culture From First Principles](https://eng.uber.com/ubers-journey-toward-better-data-culture-from-first-principles/) Krishna Puttaswamy (Uber) [Performance Differences Between Postgres and MySQL](https://blog.arctype.com/performance-difference-between-postgresql-and-mysql/) Blessing Krofegha 💻 Jobs [Splitgraph is Hiring Postgres Experts to Help Build a Data Mesh](https://www.notion.so/splitgraph/Splitgraph-is-Hiring-25b42164f0f5469eb1278899b543eb93) — Join our all-remote team. We're building a unified data platform on Postgres — a single interface to query and discover data. Splitgraph [Senior Software Engineer](https://boards.greenhouse.io/defmethod/jobs/122318) — Remote Senior Software Engineer for a software consultancy company based in NYC. Def Method 🛠 Projects and Tools [sql.js 1.5: A Library to Run SQLite on the Web](https://github.com/sql-js/sql.js) — This brings things up to SQLite 3.35.0 standards (a [pretty big release](https://antonz.org/sqlite-3-35/)). SQL.JS [SQLAlchemy 1.4.0: The Python SQL toolkit and Object Relational Mapper](https://www.sqlalchemy.org/blog/2021/03/15/sqlalchemy-1.4.0-released/) Mike B [SQL Forever: A Prepopulated Playground for SQL Experimentation](http://sqlforever.com/) — This site lets you run queries against several preloaded relational datasets. All the data sets are open source. Designed for educational purposes. Shahbaz [Creating an Excel Add-in in D](https://blog.jonharrington.org/d_excel_addin/) Jonathan Harring 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