#347 — March 26, 2021

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

'SQLite Is Not a Toy Database' — We are huge SQLite fans here, so you didn’t need us to tell you SQLite isn’t a toy, but this article provides a nice roundup of just how useful SQLite can be in case there are any skeptics out there.

Anton Zhiyanov

Speeding Up SQL Queries by Orders of Magnitude with UNION — SQL’s UNION operation isn’t usually regarded as a way to optimize query performance, but in many cases it can be used to achieve massive improvements in speed.

Ben Levy and Christian Charukiewicz

[Webinar] Distributed Principles in a Cloud-Native DatabaseWhat are the primary challenges in distributed systems? And how are modern distributed databases addressing those challenges? Join us to see examples of scale, resilience and data locality solutions in distributed systems.

CockroachDB sponsor

How We Implemented Distributed Multi-Document ACID Transactions in Couchbase — ACID transactions tended to be something you gave up when using NoSQL databases, but this is no longer the case as numerous systems like MongoDB and now Couchbase have implemented support.

Denis Rosa

'It's Been Decades. Why Don't Databases Manage Themselves Yet?' — Decades into his database-oriented career, Brent Ozar reflects on why tasks like provisioning the right resources, configuring settings, and designing intricate schemas are still largely a manual job.

Brent Ozar

Quick Bits

The Algorithms That Make Instacart Roll — An interesting, though high level, look behind the scenes of how Instacart uses all of the data at its disposal to keep the grocery picking and delivery service going. Machine learning plays a big role in estimating availability given patchy and temporally limited data sent from the stores.

IEEE Spectrum

Comparing Two Serverless Databases: AWS Aurora Serverless v2 and Fauna — The second version of AWS Aurora’s auto-scaling, on-demand ‘serverless’ variant is in preview. Fauna, on the other hand, is a cloud data API and store that’s also often called a ‘serverless’ database. Yet, they’re very different. This piece, by the CTO of Fauna, compares the two approaches in some depth.

Evan Weaver (Fauna)

The World Has Changed – Why Haven’t Database Designs? — I don’t fully agree with this opinion piece but it throws up some interesting questions to consider around how the underlying assumptions and considerations that influence database design (and the design of database systems) change over time.

Avishai Ish-Shalom

pg_query 2.0: The Easiest Way to Parse Postgres Queriespg_query is a standalone library for parsing Postgres SQL queries - version 2 adds support for Postgres 13 and includes a deparser so that manipulated parse trees can be turned back into SQL.. big opportunities there. It’s a C library but available in a Ruby library as well as Python and Node.js bindings.

Lukas Fittl

Getting Started with Postgres' EXPLAIN (ANALYZE) — Prefixing a query with EXPLAIN lets you see how Postgres’s execution planner has interpreted the query and how it plans to execute it. The ANALYZE option goes a bit further and actually runs the query supplementing the more general information.

Kat Batuigas

Best-Practices on How to Speed Up Your Postgres Queries. Free eBook — Learn how companies like Atlassian and CounterPath are able to speed up their queries by orders of magnitude. In this eBook, we share our best practices for optimizing Postgres performance.

pganalyze sponsor

Building a NoSQL E-Commerce Data Model — Learn about the key components and data models for an e-commerce store and how they’re linked together when using a noSQL data store (MongoDB, in this case).

John Gramila

Key Considerations in Moving to Graviton2 (ARM) for Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora Databases — Having developed its own ARM-based chips that promise more performance at a lower price, AWS is rather keen to get your database workloads shifted over to them – here’s the process they expect users to take.

Reagan Rosario and Tyler Lynch (AWS)

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