MongoDB 3.2 Released: 'A Giant Leap' — The faster, compressable WiredTiger storage engine is now the default. Document validation can now be performed at database level. Left outer joins are now possible, and more.

The Next Generation of Managed MySQL Offerings On Cloud SQL — Google Cloud SQL is an easy-to-use service that delivers fully managed MySQL databases and the second ‘generation’ of it is now in beta. It can scale up to 10TB datasets, 15k IOPS and 104GB of RAM per instance.

Couchbase Server 4.1 Released — Couchbase Server 4.1 brings massive improvements to query functionality and performance including support for common SQL statements in N1QL. (“you can now manipulate JSON documents with N1QL, in the same manner as you would manipulate tables with SQL”)

Plug Email Into Your App with Mailgun — Send email in your language of choice using SMTP or Mailgun's RESTful API. The first 10,000 emails are free. Read our documentation and start testing now.

The MongoDB Statbox: Graphs of Stats in 5cm by 6cm — Using just a Pi Zero, a Unicorn Hat, a slice of Python and a plug-in of Wifi, find out how you can turn you database stats into shining, physical beacons of information.

q: Run SQL Directly on CSV or TSV Files — A command line tool that allows execution of SQL-like queries on CSVs/TSVs. It treats ordinary files as database tables, and supports SQL constructs like WHERE, GROUP BY, JOINs etc.

Scaling to 100M: MySQL is a Better NoSQL — At Wix, they’re using MySQL as a glorified key/value system for storing documents rather than a dedicated NoSQL document database.

Meet the Avant-Garde of New Relational Databases — Gartner is advising clients to look at the ‘avant garde’ of relational databases, such as offerings from NuoDB, VoltDB and MemSQL.

Architecting Distributed Databases for Failure — Being prepared for failure in a distributed system is essential. Here, an engineer shares his experiences of building an open source distributed data store and the contingencies taken to survive outages.

Building Real-Time Dashboard Apps with Flink, Elasticsearch & Kibana — A demonstration of building a real-time dashboard solution for stream data analytics using Apache Flink (a streamed data processor), Elasticsearch (the document database and search server, and Kibana (Elastic’s data exploration tool).