#296 — March 20, 2020

Read on the Web

✍️ We live in unusual times and we hope you're doing okay. We're planning to keep publishing in the normal way but you may notice some changes here and there as we adapt. If you have anything to share that would help the community, virtual events, etc. hit reply and let us know and we'll try to share what we can :-)
— Peter C, your humble editor.

Database Weekly

Ways to Compute Pi in SQL — Last Saturday it was “Pi Day” (3/14) and to celebrate, the folks in MemSQL’s engineering team came up with a way to calculate the value of Pi using SQL itself.

Nikita Shamgunov (MemSQL)

Is Database Interoperability at Risk? — Reflections on the current case going on between Oracle and Google over the latter’s alleged ‘copying’ of the Java API and whether it could affect database systems ‘copying’ each other’s SQL-related additions.

Bruce Momjian

The Perfect Partner to MongoDB Atlas. Try It for Free — Studio 3T is the toolkit you need to perform queries fast and efficiently. Schedule recurring tasks, export with ease, and translate code instantly. Save hours a week with our GUI and unlock the power of MongoDB Atlas.

Studio 3T sponsor

Understanding Recursive SQL Queries — Recursive common table expressions make it possible to work with dynamic graph or hierarchically structured data within Postgres. This is quite a nice, gentle introduction to the idea to allow you to move on to more advanced guides.

Martin Heinz

MongoDB World is now MongoDB.live on May 4-5 — MongoDB World is basically the MongoDB world’s landmark event, but the COVID-19 outbreak has forced it into being a free two-day virtual event.. so even if you weren’t planning on going before, you can easily do so now.

MongoDB

In other MongoDB news, MongoDB co-creator and MongoDB Inc. CTO Eliot Horowitz is leaving the company and he's spoken on the Stack Overflow Podcast about his work there.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis Announces Global Datastore — A small step for AWS, but a big step for Redis-kind 😄 With Global Datastore, you can now write to an ElastiCache for Redis cluster in one region and see that data replicated at low latency in two other cross-region replica clusters.

Amazon Web Services

SQLite Gets Its Own User Forum — At only a week old, it’s early days, but it’s neat to have somewhere where SQLite users and developers can converse and ask questions.

SQLite

Postgres is the World's Best Database: Here's Why — We try to stay database neutral here in Database Weekly but.. “I intend to prove that by virtue of both design and implementation that PostgreSQL is objectively and measurably a better database than anything currently available..” The arguments aren't bad!

Kirk Roybal

“Scan” Your Badge & Cockroach Labs Will Donate $3 to Women Who Code — Cockroach Labs will donate $3 to Women Who Code for every person who "scans" their virtual badge. So stop by and get scanned.

Cockroach Labs sponsor

How to Model One-to-Many Relationships in DynamoDB — DynamoDB’s document based approach means that if you’re more familiar with relational databases, you need to take some care when working out how to model things like this.

Alex DeBrie

Ramping Up on Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility) — Amazon’s DocumentDB is a scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. This blog post provides a quick summary and set of resources to the topics that are most often asked about - so that you can quickly ramp up on Amazon DocumentDB.

AWS

How Netflix Uses Druid for Real-Time Insights“We’re currently ingesting at over 2 million events per second, and querying over 1.5 trillion rows to get detailed insights into how our users are experiencing the service.”

Ben Sykes (Netflix)

Automating MySQL Schema Migrations with GitHub Actions and More — A deep dive into how GitHub’s daily schema migrations amounted to a significant toil on their database infrastructure team, and how they searched for a solution to automate the manual parts of the process.

Shlomi Noach (GitHub)

The Troublesome Active Record Pattern — The Active Record Pattern is particularly inefficient even if it initially makes developers’ lives easier.

Cal Paterson

Bucketisation: Using Cassandra for Time Series Data Scans

Vikas Rajoria

Debugging MySQL Replication Lag by Diving Into The Internals

Will Sewell

riskquant: A Library for Quantifying Risk — We missed this release a couple of months ago, but riskquant is a Python library that can be used for risk analysis.

Netflix Technology