Five Online Database Modelling Services — Browser technology has progressed so rapidly that online database modelling tools have become viable. Are they good enough to use now? Robert Sheldon finds out.

Using Cassandra for Analytics: A Performance and Storage Analysis — Comparing the effects of storage format, modeling/filtering, caching, and other effects on analytical query speed and storage cost in Apache Cassandra.

Spark Rises to Become Most Active Open Source Project in Big Data — Adoption interest in Spark has topped MapReduce, says a new survey. What’s supporting interest is the need for speed, boosting agility, and revenues.

Database Compatibility for Oracle Explained — Learn how organizations can reduce their database spend by 80% or more by deploying EDB Postgres in place of traditional database solutions like Oracle, according to calculations in a recent Gartner report.

How to Perform Random Queries on MongoDB — A common problem across all types of database, MongoDB 3.2 now has a $sample operator that implements a native random sample operation over a collection data set.

10 Tips for Integrating NoSQL Databases in Your Business — NoSQL databases provide the agility, scalability, performance and availability to support many applications today, but implementing them is not always easy. Here are 10 tips for integrating NoSQL systems in your organization.

mysqldump-secure: A MySQL Backup Tool with Security in Mind — Encryption is done before the backup file is written to disk to avoid possible race conditions.

Design Your Database for Flexibility — “One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is to spend extra effort thinking about the database when setting out to build something new.”

Using GraphQL with NoSQL database ArangoDB — GraphQL is a Facebook-created query language for requesting datasets over the Web (it essentially provides an alternative to REST APIs). As a multi-model database, it’s possible to get it working with ArangoDB.