Why SQL Is Simply Awesome — Lukas Eder, founder of Data Geekery, waxes lyrical on SQL and dispels some commonly repeated fallacies while looking at its strengths.

Couchbase 4.0 Released, Adds Multi Dimensional Scaling and More — Couchbase 4.0 is available, bringing secondary indexes, geo-spatial indexes, workload isolation, and a new storage engine.

You Probably Don’t Use SQL INTERSECT or EXCEPT Often Enough — While JOIN operations are much more versatile, they are also more complex for the simple tasks that can be solved by UNION, INTERSECT, and EXCEPT.

Redis Performance Dashboard and Autoscaling from RedisGreen — Ever wonder what your Redis server was actually doing? Find out with RedisGreen's dashboard and monitoring tools.

How Airbnb Partitioned Its Main Database in Two Weeks — A walk through how Airbnb used MySQL’s replication on Amazon RDS to partition the database with only brief downtime and without writing any bookkeeping or migration code.

What PostgreSQL Has Over Other Open Source SQL Databases — First in a series of posts looking at Postgres’ strengths. In this outing, it looks at the storage of data.

AWS Database Migration Service — Amazon has unveiled a preview of a new AWS service to help you migrate databases to AWS without any downtime. It supports all widely used databases.

SpaceCurve: An Utterly Unique And Absurdly Fast Geospatial Database — “SpaceCurve is a prototype of a new class of database architecture. It fuses two novel computer science foundations that make it optimal for workloads that mix extremely high concurrent write rates with low-latency parallel queries.”

How to Make a Box-and-Whisker Plot in SQL — Understanding how your data is distributed is critical for any analysis. Box-and-whisker plots are great for summarizing distributions and comparing distributions across datasets. Here’s how to create them in SQL.