#340 — February 5, 2021

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

Achieving 11M IOPS and 66 GB/s IO on a Single Workstation — When correctly configured, modern machines can be so fast on their own that many scaling or distribution issues can fade away if you so wish. No specific database system is involved here but it’s fascinating to see how far a single modern workstation can be stretched and how databases can benefit from it.

Tanel Poder

'10 Things I Hate About SQL' — The author is quick to note that he thinks SQL is awesome, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things about it he finds less than awesome. He’s wrong about point two, but if you’re in the mood for an opinion piece.. 😄

Shaker Islam

Comparing Fauna and DynamoDB: Features & Pricing — Fauna and DynamoDB are both serverless databases, but their design goals, architecture, and use cases are very different. This post discusses where they shine, where they don’t, and how they offer fundamentally different value propositions.

Fauna sponsor

TimescaleDB 2.0 Now Generally Available — The Timescale folks revealed TimescaleDB 2.0 late last year but now it’s GA. If you want an open source, highly scalable, time series database sat atop Postgres, check it out.

Erik Nordström (Timescale)

The Unexpected Find That Freed 20GB of Unused Index Space in PostgreSQL — A thorough look at ways to free space without dropping indexes or deleting data including cleaning up unused indexes taking up space and, in particular, replacing an index containing a huge number of null values with a partial index.

Haki Benita

Quick Bits

▶  Answering an Advanced SQL Question from Amazon — If you want to stretch and test your SQL knowledge, this guy’s videos seem pretty useful generally. This one tackles an advanced SQL challenge raised by Amazon in a data scientist interview.

Nate at StrataScratch

Migrating a Commercial Database to Open Source with AWS SCT and AWS DMS — AWS’s push to get people off of commercial database engines and on to open source databases (hosted at AWS, naturally) continues. Here, we learn about the AWS Schema Conversion Tool and the Database Migration Service which can assist such migrations.

Hooman Hamilton (AWS)

Guide for Linux Users: Tune PostgreSQL & EDB Postgres Advanced Server — Download this guide to get a set of recommendations to configure and tune PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres Advanced Server.

EDB sponsor

Machine Learning Offers Fresh Approach to Tackling SQL Injection Vulnerabilities — How academics are experimenting with using reinforcement learning to automate the SQL injection exploitation process.

Ben Dickson

Use IBM Cloud SQL Query to Analyze VPC Network Traffic from IBM Cloud Flow Logs for VPC — A bit niche and IBM-specific but it’s neat to see SQL for analyzing networking logs.

Daniel Pittner and Powell Quiring (IBM)

Serving Map Tiles from SQLite with MBTiles and datasette-tiles
Simon Willison

Top 10 Microsoft SQL Server Tips
Nikita Starichenko

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers and work on projects for Riot Games, FOX, Sony, Coinbase, and more.

X-Team

🔨 Code and Tools

SQL Formatter: A Pretty Printer for SQL Queries — A JavaScript library (and CLI tool) for pretty printing SQL queries by creative use of whitespace. Supports numerous SQL dialects from SQL:2011 to dialects used by Postgres, DB2, Oracle, and more. There’s also an online demo.

ZeroTurnaround

Introducing Sqlcommenter: An Open Source ORM Auto-Instrumentation Library — An open source library that enables ORMs to augment SQL statements before execution, with comments containing information about the code that caused its execution. Available for certain ORMs in Python, Java, Node.js and Ruby. GitHub repo.

Bala Chandrasekeran (Google Cloud)

minikeyvalue: A Distributed Key Value Store in Under 1000 Lines

George Hotz