#338 — January 22, 2021

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let's Encrypt — Let’s Encrypt, the non profit certificate authority, is huge, and issues about 2 million certificates per day. Unsurprisingly, their database is important and needs to scale, and here’s how they do it (spoiler: they use MariaDB).

Josh Aas and James Renken (Let's Encrypt)

'Why We Had to Change Elastic Licensing' — There's an ongoing trend of open source companies being unhappy with cloud providers like Amazon offering commercial, managed services built on 'their' tech. MongoDB is a classic example. So it goes too with Elastic and Elasticsearch (a popular search-oriented data store). People are not happy with the license change and AWS has duly announced open source forks of both Elasticsearch and Kibana. This is a messy story with no real winners and we're bound to see more of this over time.

Shay Banon (Elastic)

Combining Serverless, DynamoDB and Bigtable — The distributed design of Amazon Dynamo with Google's Bigtable data model? Yep, that’s Apache Cassandra on DataStax Astra: the proven, globally distributed, highly available cloud database. Try our serverless beta. | No credit card, free to 5GB.

DataStax Astra sponsor

Building a Knowledge Graph in Amazon Neptune using Amazon Comprehend EventsNeptune is a managed graph database available on AWS that I rarely see anyone writing about (probably due to the cost). So this week we get a treat with this writeup of building a knowledge base on top of it, as well as a look at enabling low code graph data apps with Neptune and Graphistry.

Amazon Web Services

The Impact of Data Model on MongoDB Database Size — The author discovered that making various tweaks to his data model yielded various performance and database size improvements.

Michał Knasiecki

How to Make GraphQL and DynamoDB Play Nicely Together — DynamoDB is super scalable and pretty easy to use (once you get over the data modeling approach) but it’s quite idiomatic. Here’s how to approach integrating it with GraphQL if you don’t want to lean on something like AWS AppSync or Amplify.

Ryan Bethel

Creating a REST API for Amazon DocumentDB with Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda — If you’re more on the AWS side of things and using the MongoDB-compatible-ish DocumentDB, this may be of interest if you want to use it to build a serverless REST API.

Amazon Web Services

📌 4 Ways to Use SQL for Time-Series DataGet quick tips for using your SQL skills for time-series data analysis, complete with technical guidance & our favorite tools 🙌

Timescale sponsor

A New Oracle to Postgres Migration Guide for Azure Users — Microsoft really doesn't want you using Oracle, and they've released a new, detailed migration guide (PDF) for moving Oracle workloads to Azure Database for PostgreSQL, if you ever need to do that.

Arun Kumar Thiagarajan

Labelling a Dataset with a Few Lines of Code — A basic walkthrough the steps to do algorithmic labelling of visual content.

Eric Landau

Upgrading From Amazon RDS for MySQL Version 5.5 — Amazon RDS for MySQL 5.5 is reaching its end of life – here’s a rather detailed article on your upgrade options.

Amazon Web Services

💻 Jobs

Principal Backend Engineer - Remote or in Beautiful Norway — Do you have a passion for GraphQL, NodeJS, and message drive distributed architectures? Join our remote-first engineering team.

Crystallize

🔨 Code and Tools

pg_activity 2.0: A top-Like Server Activity Monitoring Tool for Postgres — Much as you might use top on a server to monitor processes and CPU usage, pg_activity provides a similar approach for checking up on PostgreSQL. 2.0.0 just dropped.

Dalibo

Amazon Unveils Open Distro for Elasticsearch — In case you missed the big Elasticsearch licensing story above, Amazon has forked Elasticsearch and will be offering its own Apache 2.0 licensed open source variant of Elasticsearch (and Kibana) here on.

Amazon Web Services

Litestream: Streaming Replication for SQLite — Standalone streaming replication tool for SQLite. It runs as a background process and safely replicates changes incrementally to another file or S3.

Ben Johnson

Scylla Open Source Release 4.3 — Scylla is an open source, NoSQL database focused on performance and low latency.

Tzach Livyatan (Scylla)

Preview: The SQLite Llibrary as a .NET Assembly

Eric Sink