#262 — April 15, 2020

Read on the Web

GitHub Shakes Up Pricing, Makes Most Core Features Free — One of the good consequences of Microsoft acquiring GitHub seems to be that they want to open it up to everyone without any barriers, so now you can use GitHub for private development with unlimited collaborators for free, and even the enterprise features are cheaper now.

Nat Friedman (GitHub)

Comparing HTTP/3 vs. HTTP/2 Performance — HTTP/3 is still in a draft status spec-wise, but it’s already being supported here and there, including on Cloudflare. This post covers where HTTP/3 is right now, why it matters, and some basic benchmarks.

Sreeni Tellakula (Cloudflare)

We Now Offer Remote Go, Docker or Kubernetes Training — We offer live-streaming remote training as well as video training for engineers and companies that want to learn Go, Docker and/or Kubernetes. Having trained over 5,000 engineers, we have carefully crafted these classes for students to get as much value as possible.

Ardan Labs sponsor

Ask HN: How to Rediscover the Joy of Programming? — A popular Hacker News discussion from this week about how to make programming really click for you, rather than being merely a daily slog.

Hacker News

How Deploys Work at Slack — When you’re running a service that’s used at the heart of so many companies, like Slack, deploys require a careful balance of speed and reliability. This is a very high level look at what Slack does.

Slack Engineering

???? Jobs

Full-Stack Developer (Skien, Norway) — We are looking for a full-stack dev with a solid track record to help us adapt to tomorrow's security requirements.

OKAY

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Stories and Opinions

The Death of Hype: What's Next for Scala — Most languages go through a ‘hype cycle’ and Scala’s initial peak was quite a few years ago now but what’s the long term outlook like?

Haoyi

The Case for Human-Centric Observability

Lightstep sponsor

Clocking a 6502 to 15GHz — Via emulation, of course :-)

Chris Evans

The Malleable Systems Manifesto — An attempt to explore the idea of software being easy to change, reusable, sharable, and thoughtfully crafted.

Malleable Systems Collective

What Outranks Thread Priority? — When reawakening his laptop because to take longer and longer, Bruce set out to find the cause..

Bruce Dawson

Why NextDNS Is My New Favourite DNS Service — Note: This is about using a third party DNS service as a client rather than for serving records.

Stanislas Lange

???? Tutorials

How to Monitor Your Web Page's Total Memory Usage with performance.measureMemory() — Learn how to measure memory usage of your web page in production to detect regressions. (Chrome only, for now.)

Ulan Degenbaev

How Anti-Cheat Systems Detect System Emulation — Not an area I’m involved in but this is fascinating. These folks really know their stuff.

Daax, iPower, ajkhoury, and Drew

▶  Easy And Correct High Availability Postgres with Kubernetes — A 50 minute talk from PostgresOpen 2019 that goes all the way ‘from containers up’ until actually doing stuff with Postgres.

Steven Pousty

Some GitHub Pro-Tips Direct from GitHub — Lee Reilly is a developer and marketer at GitHub and has a whole bunch of genuinely useful GitHub power user tips here.

Lee Reilly (GitHub)

Untangling Microservices, or Balancing Complexity in Distributed Systems — “The microservices honeymoon period is over.” Vladik looks at why, as well as at common design issues that turn microservices into ‘distributed big balls of mud’.

Vladik Khononov

▶  Explore Your Microservices Architecture with Graph Theory and Network Science — Can we improve microservice architectures using graph theory? Apparently yes.

Nicki Watt

Continuous Deployments for WordPress Using GitHub Actions — Shipping code to a production server often requires paid services. With GitHub Actions, Continuous Deployment is free for everyone. Read how to set that up.

Steffen Bewersdorff

The DevSecOps Security Checklist — The checklist brings security, operations & engineering together to up-level security without impacting velocity.

Sqreen sponsor

A Beginners Guide to Basic Indexing in Postgres

James Bannister

???? Code and Tools

The Desmos Graphing Calculator — One of those long-standing tools I lean on every now and then that I think everyone should know about. Ideal for graphing functions, doing approximations, etc.. and you don’t have to sign in or anything ????

Desmos

All 200+ Google Cloud Products Described in 4 Words or Less — This is a neat poster. We need AWS and Azure versions of this as well.

Greg Wilson

IntelliJ IDEA 2020.1 Released — Now supports Java 14 and its new features.

JetBrains

Portray: A Python3 Documentation Generation Tool — I’m only a Pythonista on rare occasion, but this looks really neat.

Timothy Crosley

mv.sh: Rename Files with mv Without Typing The Name Twice

Přemek Vyhnal

regex2fat: Turn Your Favorite Regex into FAT32 — This is an absolutely terrible idea (but in a fun, entertaining way ????)

8051Enthusiast

The Simpsons in CSS — Just a bit of fun, but neat to see what you can whip up with (a lot of) CSS.

Chris Pattle

#263 — April 22, 2020

Read on the Web

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder — This is not a technical article but is an important one nonetheless. Lee Holloway essentially programmed Cloudflare into being. But then he became distant and unpredictable, and what happened to him is something that could affect any of us ????

Sandra Upson (WIRED)

How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux — Even more exciting times are coming for development on Linux thanks to these technologies. A good overview.

Glauber Costa

Slow CI Build? Get a 41:1 ROI by Switching to Semaphore — For every $1 invested in Semaphore, engineers gain $41 in reclaimed productivity. Who said money can’t buy you time?

Semaphore 2.0 sponsor

▶  Mob Programming and the Power of Flow — I enjoyed this insightful walk through the idea of bringing people together and attempting to develop things in an efficient way with numerous people around the same machine (a.k.a. ‘mob’ programming). It’s not for everyone, but it’s neat to see how it can work.

Woody Zuill

Cloudflare Workers Now Supports.. COBOL — COBOL is one of the earliest things you could really call a programming language (it first appeared in 1959!) and is often a source of amusement because it’s seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. Nonetheless, it’s still in use (particularly in legacy systems) and you can use with Cloudflare Workers too!

John Graham-Cumming

???? Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Stories and Opinions

How 'Memories', a 256 Byte Demo, Was Coded — You can watch the demo here or enjoy learning just how these unusual developers cram so much into so little space.

HellMood/DESiRE

The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories — For pioneering computer scientist Donald Knuth, good coding is synonymous with beautiful expression.

Quanta Magazine

▶  Discussing NGINX and Service Meshes with Alan Murphy — I enjoyed this SE Daily episode last week and learnt a fair bit.

Software Engineering Daily podcast

End-to-End Observability for Microservice Environments — Optimize service costs and reduce MTTR with full data correlation, payload visibility and automated tracing. Try free.

Epsagon sponsor

▶  Performance Profiling for Web Applications — An overview of how to use Chrome DevTools to understand a Web application’s performance bottlenecks.

Sam Saccone

Are Object Stores Starting to Look Like Databases? — A bit, yes.

Alex Woodie (Datanami)

The Case Against CS Master’s Degrees

Oz Onay

Why I Stopped Using Microservices

Robin Wieruch

???? Tutorials

Ask HN: I'm A Software Engineer Going Blind, How Should I Prepare? — This is something I hope none of you have to go through, but we’ve linked to other stories about being a blind coder in the past, and some form of sight loss will affect many of us over the years.

Hacker News

Writing an 'Emulator' in JavaScript (and Interfacing with Multiple UIs) — Tania built a Chip-8 interpreter in JavaScript and has gone into quite a bit of detail about what was involved here. Lots of neat bits and pieces to pick up from this.

Tania Rascia

What It Took to Build a Serverless App That Texts Positive COVID-19 News — Code, a screencast tour, and an article looking at what it took to build a simple serverless app using C#, Azure Functions, and Twilio to text news alerts (but only ones with positive sentiments!)

Gwyneth Pena S.

If You Use grep On Text Files, Use the -a (--text) Option — I could explain why but then you wouldn’t need to read this. Makes a good point.

Chris Siebenmann

Event-Reduce: An Algorithm to Optimize Frequently Running Queries? — In brief, the idea is that rather than having to re-run queries when data changes on a table, you can basically merge in changes to previous query results. Be sure to check the FAQs.

Daniel Meyer

Embedding Binary Objects in C

Ted Unangst

???? Code and Tools

Desed: A Debugger for sed — Demystify and debug your sed (the text processor that comes with nearly every Unix) scripts, from the comfort of your terminal. Step through line by line, place breakpoints, etc.

SoptikHa2

Falcon: An Open-Source, Cross Platform SQL Client — Built around Electron and React, this basic client can quickly do chart visualizations of query results and can connect to RedShift, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Impala, MS SQL, Oracle, SQLite and more.

Plotly

The SaaS CTO Security Checklist

Sqreen sponsor

Termible: Offer Terminal Apps in the Browser Without Installation — This is a commercial service but I find the idea intriguing. You provide a Dockerfile, embed some code on your site, and let people play with your product/service “live”. HTTPie seems to use it for its live examples.

Termible

X410: An X Server for Windows 10 — If you’re using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to run Linux behind the scenes of a Windows 10 install, X410 takes things to another graphical level.

Choung Networks

60 Linux Networking Commands and Scripts — “I decided to create a network tools go-to-list for myself. Then, I thought, why not turn the list into a blog post?”

Hayden James

Brök: A Tool to Find Broken Links in Text Documents — Built in Haskell.

Mark Wales

xsv: A Fast CSV Command Line Toolkit Written in Rust. — Another ‘Swiss Army knife’ for your slightly structured data.

Andrew Gallant

#264 — April 29, 2020

Read on the Web

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) Released — Lots of goodies in the latest Ubuntu release which will surely form the basis for many a server over the next several years (its standard support will end in April 2025). Some related info:

• It uses Linux kernel 5.4 which introduces WireGuard VPN support and kernel lockdown.
• Phoronix have run tons of Ubuntu 18.04 vs 20.04 benchmarks on a 48 core Xeon server and found significant performance improvements for server use cases.
• There's also Lubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu MATE 20.04 and Xubuntu 20.04 if you prefer alternative desktop environments.
• People are still frustrated by snaps, but you can disable them.

Canonical

Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases — A Google engineer shares 17 insights about databases she’s picked up over the years. I strongly recommend this piece and I identify with lots of the points myself..

Jaana B. Dogan

Audit Every SQL Query — JackDB is a modern database client with comprehensive audit logging and role-based access controls. Learn more about auditing database operations with JackDB.

JackDB, Inc. sponsor

How The Final Python 2 Release Marks the End of an Era — Last week we casually slipped in a note about 2.7.18 being Python 2’s final release but.. maybe it deserved a bigger story than that. Luckily Stack Overflow’s Ryan Donovan is here with one.

Ryan Donovan

AMP Introduces 'User-Friendly' Content Encryption Support — AMP aims to be all about providing speed to mobile consumers of content but paywalls just, well, get in the way. So Google and the AMP folks have come up with a way where protected content can be served and unlocked client-side for more performance. Cynically, of course, you could consider this yet another form of DRM for Web content..

The AMP Blog

???? Jobs

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

???? Stories and Opinions

Two Months with PowerShell on a UNIX — You can’t use it as a login shell yet, but otherwise Microsoft’s PowerShell (which is more commonly associated with Windows) isn’t too bad.

Joe Wright

'Teleforking' a Process Onto a Different Computer — Imagine if instead of calling fork you could call telefork and have a process forked onto other machines within a cluster.. this developer rigged up a fun prototype.

Tristan Hume

▶  Discussing Serverless Use Cases with Gareth McCumskey — A chat with Gareth McCumskey (of Serverless Inc) about different production-level serverless use cases including RESTful APIs, GraphQL, WebSockets, and capturing clickstream data.

The Serverless Chats Podcast podcast

How Twitter Engineers Hunted Down a Linux Kernel Bug — When two Twitter engineers reset a Linux server’s firewall config, they expected things to work.. but it didn’t, and they unearthed (and fixed!) a kernel bug along the way.

Cong Wang and Dan Luu (Twitter)

To Microservices and Back Again: Why Segment Went Back to a Monolith — When Segment moved to a microservices architecture, they gained environmental isolation, but at a cost of higher operational overhead. Three years later, the costs were too high, and the team migrated back to a monolith..

Thomas Betts and Alexandra Noonan

How Mozilla Engineers Code Quality in the Firefox Browser — An insider’s look at Firefox’s code quality toolchain that’s been designed to manage the ongoing development and releases of the popular desktop browser.

Mozilla Hacks

???? Tutorials

The Tool That Really Runs Your Containers: Deep Dive Into runc and OCI Specifications — runc is a container runtime that was extracted from Docker over the years and is now maintained separately but which still does the work of spawning and running containers.

Kirill Shirinkin

Decoupling Larger Applications with Amazon EventBridge — How to use an event-based architecture to decouple services and functional areas of applications. (EventBridge is AWS’s serverless app-to-app event bus.)

James Beswick (AWS)

The Complete Guide to Distributed Tracing

Lightstep sponsor

▶  Discussing Docker and Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower — A worthwhile show to listen to if Kubernetes and Docker intimidate you but you want to know a little more. Kelsey is good at breaking these things down into understandable pieces.

Rails with Jason Podcast podcast

A Variety of C Obfuscation Tricks — C is, like many languages, well suited to trickery and here’s a look at some of it.

Colin Ian King

???? Code and Tools

Will It CORS? — A handy online tool/wizard for establishing how your (potential) use case will (or won’t!) operate alongside CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing).

HTTP Toolkit

sls-dev-tools v1.0: Think DevTools But for Serverless — “Think Chrome Dev Tools but for Serverless” say the team behind sls-dev-tools. They work with AWS Lambda and alongside tools like Serverless Framework or SAM.

Theodo

IPFS 0.5.0 Released: A Major Leap Forward for Peer to Peer Kind — IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is perhaps the best known peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol and it has been seeing some high profile adoption as shown here.

Molly Mackinlay

The Super Simple AWS Storage Calculator — A quick way to compare how much it costs to store certain amounts of data on various AWS services at differing levels of robustness.

The Duckbill Group

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

Windows Terminal Preview v0.11 Release — A lot of updates here for Microsoft’s official terminal app prior to an even bigger 1.0 release.

Microsoft

MsQuic: Microsoft Open Sources Its QUIC Library — A cross-platform, general-purpose library that implements the QUIC transport protocol. GitHub repo.

Daniel Havey (Microsoft)

Editly: Slick, Declarative Command Line Video Editing — I’ve long wondered why there isn’t a good way to “code” video editing at the command line other than wrangling with arcane ffmpeg options. Well.. this uses ffmpeg, but it handles a lot of the wrangling for you.

Mikael Finstad

Pomerium: An Identity-Aware Secure Access Proxy — An identity aware access-proxy modeled after Google’s BeyondCorp. Think VPN access benefits but without the VPN. Built in Go, naturally.

Pomerium

98.css: CSS for Building Faithful Recreations of Windows 98 — If for any reason you need your Web site’s interface to look like Windows 98…

Jordan Scales

pxy: A Go Livestream Proxy from WebSocket to External RTMP Endpoints

Chua Bing Quan

#265 — May 6, 2020

Read on the Web

Caddy 2: The Go-Powered Web Server with Automatic, Default TLS — After over a year of redesign, Caddy 2 has a new architecture to v1. If you want a new HTTPS server that ‘just works’, Caddy is well worth a look IMO. Its lead creator, Matt Holt, answered lots of questions on this Hacker News thread about the release.

Caddy Web Server

Redis 6.0 Released — The next major release of the popular data structure server is here. Redis is at the heart of so many data systems nowadays that any major release is big news but 6.0 packs in a lot of new bits and pieces that make it more robust and capable of modern workloads, including:

• Access Control Lists (ACL) for limiting what certain clients can do.
• Diskless replication on replicas.
• Threaded I/O (but Redis itself remains primarily single threaded).
• SSL/TLS support.
• A new client-server protocol, RESP3.

Salvatore Sanfilippo

Faster CI/CD for All Your Software Projects Using Buildkite — See how Shopify scaled from 300 to 1800 engineers while keeping their build times under 5 minutes.

Buildkite sponsor

An 'Extra Dumbed Down' Explanation of BGP — The BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) is a fundamental part of how the Internet works by defining and exchanging routing information between systems. This post explains what BGP is but, importantly, what its flaws are and how it needs to be made better.

RevK

How PHP is Beginning to Show Its Maturity — “If you still think PHP lacks an appropriate object model, you might be pleasantly surprised taking a look again.” Add proper FFI, dependency management, and security to the mix and PHP looks better than ever as of version 7.4.

John Coggeshall (LWN)

What Netlify’s Infrastructure Team Learned As It Increased Deploy Speed by Up to 2x — How the infrastructure team at Netlify took a 4 year old codebase, isolated an issue, tested a few different solutions, and eventually improved observability while rolling it out to production.

Epure, Neal and Drasner

???? Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

???? Stories and Opinions

How a Few Lines of Code Broke Lots of JavaScript Packages — A week ago JavaScript developers were reporting breakage in numerous key packages. The culprit? A tiny change in a tiny dependency. A fix was quickly deployed and the creator of the affected project reflects on what happened here.

Forbes Lindesay

systemd, 10 Years Later: A Historical and Technical Retrospective

V.R.

Initial Impressions of WSL 2 — WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) is a compatibility layer for running Linux executables natively within Windows 10 and ”..it feels like a new era for web development on Windows.”

Dave Rupert

What Port Numbers Do Developers Use Locally? — A look at what port numbers developers are using locally in development.

Roland Crosby

▶  A Language Head to Head: Kotlin 4 vs. Scala 3

Garth Gilmour and Eamonn Boyle

▶  Does Agile Make Us Less Secure? — Weighing up the balance between older ways of making things ‘just so’ before deploying versus pushing to production numerous times a day.

Michael Brunton-Spall

How to Remain Agile with DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB delivers performance at scale but at a cost to flexibility. See how the costs can be mitigated to remain Agile.

Rob Cronin

???? Tutorials

Using AWS CodeBuild to Execute Administrative Tasks — A look at using AWS CodeBuild to run scheduled or adhoc jobs. It’s not the first tool most would jump to (as it’s marketed as a build service) but the flexibility provided is pretty neat and might help you package together code in a way that better suits your use case (it’s well suited for batch jobs that take a while to run, rather than 500ms functions, say!)

Gojko Adzic

Git Branch Naming Conventions — A primer on naming branches for modern git workflows to help organize your or your team’s work.

Sanket Saurav

Implementing Conway's Game of Life in 32 Bytes — Not exactly a tutorial but if you can read x86 you’ll learn something. Here’s a video of it in action.

SizeCoding

TLDR: Writing a Slack bot to Summarize Articles — Using state-of-the-art NLP to read more news, faster? I always find automated summaries to be kinda useless, but the way it’s put together is neat nonetheless.

Chris Ismael

OAuth 2.0 Security Best Current Practices

IETF

Using PostgreSQL for JSON Storage — With JSON and JSONB types and associated advanced ways to query such columns, using Postgres as a store for JSON data is pretty simple. This is the briefest of overviews but leads into an interactive online tutorial.

Steve Pousty

???? Code and Tools

Never IPv4: A Quick Way to Test Your IPv6 Support — If this site doesn't load for you, you're in the majority! It's a test site that only has AAAA records and so will only work on a fully working IPv6 stack. NeverIPv6.com provides the opposite.

As207960 Cyfyngedig

actions-cli: Monitor Your GitHub Actions in Real Time from the Command Line

Tommaso De Rossi

Pixie Is Alive. Monitor & Trace K8s Apps On-Prem Without Changing Code — At-scale streaming, gaming, e-comm & SaaS SRE teams run eBPF based edge monitoring Pixie scripts to debug in minutes.

Pixie sponsor

Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs — Backblaze B2 has been a compelling alternative to S3 for a while on price alone but now it shares an API too.

Gleb Budman

awesome-kubernetes: A Curated List for Awesome Kubernetes Sources — A lot of k8s resources here from installers and useful articles to platforms, projects, books, and Twitter accounts.

Ramit Surana

Rich: A Python Library for Rich Text and Beautiful Formatting in the Terminal — This does look really nice.

Will McGugan

#300 — April 17, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

Are Object Stores Starting to Look Like Databases? — Technically, any repository of data could be considered a ‘database’ but now object stores, such as those vast repositories of data sitting behind an S3 API, are beginning to resemble more structured, traditional databases in many ways. This feels a trend and market that will continue to grow in the near future.

Alex Woodie (Datanami)

Event-Reduce: An Algorithm to Optimize Frequently Running Queries — In brief, the idea is that rather than having to re-run queries when data changes on a table, you can basically merge in changes to previous query results. Be sure to check the FAQs.

Daniel Meyer

ACID Transactions in NoSQL? RavenDB Vs MongoDB by Mor Hilai — Where did the stereotype that only relational databases can be fully ACID come from? How did two NoSQL databases, MongoDB & RavenDB, become ACID at the cluster level?

RavenDB sponsor

TerminusDB: A Technical History — We’ve featured it before, but TerminusDB is an open source in-memory graph database built around WOQL (the Web Object Query Language). Here’s an explanation of where it came from and why it exists.

Luke Feeney

Comparing Redis 6's New Multithreaded I/O to ElastiCache and KeyDB — Redis 6 is on the way with threaded I/O being one of the likely new features. KeyDB is a Redis fork whose raison d’etre has been being multithreaded so this comparison may be of interest, though do note that this comes from KeyDB itself.

Ben Schermel (KeyDB)

Intersecting GPS Tracks to Identify Infected Individuals — I’m not a huge fan of COVID-19 related content, but this is a pretty interesting technique with numerous use cases. Essentially it uses PostGIS to identify overlapping paths.

Florian Nadler

Authentication Configuration in PostgreSQL and CockroachDB — In these databases, client authentication can be controlled via a ‘HBA’ (host-based authentication) file.

Raphael ‘kena’ Poss

How MongoDB Enables Machine Learning — If you haven’t played with the popular document-oriented database in a while, you can do quite a few things with it nowadays, including training and using ML algorithms.

Mani Yangkatisal

▶  'We Got that Database', an 'All About that Bass' Parody — This is for fun only! A group of librarians have put together a fun database flavored parody of the rather irritating Meghan Trainor hit ????

Tredyffrin Libraries on YouTube

6 SQL Tricks Every Data Scientist Should Know

Yi Li

Why We Index Everything — Tired of managing indexes to speed up queries? Rockset automatically indexes every field in a row-based store, column-based store, and search index.

Rockset sponsor

Falcon: An Open-Source, Cross Platform SQL Client — Built around Electron and React, this basic client can quickly do chart visualizations of query results and can connect to RedShift, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, Impala, MS SQL, Oracle, SQLite and more.

Plotly

GeoDB: A Persistent Geospatial Database with Geofencing and Google Maps Support — Built using Badger gRPC and the Google Maps API. Track the geolocation of objects across boundaries or in relation to other objects.

Coleman Word

▶️ Get ready for your next role: Pluralsight is free for the entire month of April. Stay Home. Skill Up. #FreeApril — SPONSORED

???? Seen on Twitter..

I think most of us have had this sort of experience with a 'legacy' system before.. ????

#301 — April 24, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

'Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases' — A Google engineer (whose name may be familiar to those Go developers amongst you) shares 17 insights about databases she’s picked up over the years. I strongly recommend this piece and I identify with lots of the points myself..

Jaana B. Dogan

Lambda Store: A New 'Serverless Redis' Service — This seems a neat idea. Claiming to not be just another Redis cloud service, Lambda Store applies a serverless-style pricing model which opens up a variety of neat use cases for the popular data structure server (serverless caching, for starters). The underlying system appears to be a custom clone of Redis rather than the real deal, however.

Sven Anderson

???? AWS, GCP, & Azure Punch Back at the 2020 Cloud Report — AWS, GCP, & Azure each responded to the Cockroach Labs 2020 Cloud Report with instructions on how to tune their respective clouds for optimal performance.

Cockroach Labs sponsor

How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux — Even more exciting times are coming for development on Linux thanks to these technologies. A good overview from an engineer at ScyllaDB.

Glauber Costa

kvrocks: An Open Source, RocksDB-based, Redis-compatible Database — You know Redis’s API is good when so many projects continue to implement it for themselves. kvrocks brings the Redis API (with pretty good support) together with the RocksDB persistent key-value store. Written in C++.

Bit Leak

Mireo SpaceTime: An Absurdly Fast Spatiotemporal Database? — The SpaceTime database provides unprecedented analytical tools speed, sometimes outperforming other state-of-the-art solutions by three orders of magnitude.

Miljen Mikić

Cloud GPUs Aimed at Data Scientists — Core Scientific, an AI and cloud infrastructure vendor, is teaming with GPU-accelerated analytics specialist SQream Technologies to deliver a “GPU Cloud for Data Scientists.”

Datanami

An Easy Postgres 12 and pgAdmin 4 Setup with Docker — Docker provides an easy and loosely coupled way to get things set up in a development environment.

Jonathan S. Katz

Why We Index Everything — Tired of constantly managing indexes to speed up queries? Learn about how Rockset automatically indexes every field in a row-based store, column-based store, and search index.

Rockset sponsor

Redis Labs Moving RedisJSON to a New Codebase Written in Rust — RedisJSON provides a JSON data type to Redis and it’s been ported from C to Rust for better safety and developer experience.

Gavrie Philipson (Redis Labs)

Replicate Multiple Postgres Servers to a Single MongoDB Server using Logical Decoding Output Plugin

David Zhang

xsv: A Fast CSV Command Line Toolkit Written in Rust — Another ‘Swiss Army knife’ for your slightly structured data.

Andrew Gallant

???? Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands.

X-Team

Data Engineer (Remote - USA Only) — Help us architect and design “big data” systems which require queries returning within sub-second response times.

Social Chorus

#302 — May 1, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

Redis 6.0 Released — The next major release of the popular data structure server is here. Redis is at the heart of so many data systems nowadays that any major release is big news but 6.0 packs in a lot of new bits and pieces that make it more robust and capable of modern workloads, including:

• Access Control Lists (ACL) for limiting what certain clients can do.
• Diskless replication on replicas.
• Threaded I/O (but Redis itself remains primarily single threaded).
• SSL/TLS support.
• A new client-server protocol, RESP3.

Salvatore Sanfilippo

You Can Now Do Serverless Streaming ETL with AWS Glue — If you want to analyze data on the fly as it arrives, you can now use AWS Glue (AWS’s ETL service) with streaming platforms like Kinesis Data Streams or Kafka which opens up a lot of opportunities as demonstrated here.

Danilo Poccia (AWS)

Monitor Database Performance End-To-End with OOTB Dashboards — Datadog’s customizable, built-in dashboards allow you to collect and visualize custom metrics, like saturation and resource utilization, in real-time. Unify your metrics, traces and logs in one platform. Try it free with a 14-day trial.

Datadog sponsor

Can Apache Kafka Replace a Database? - The 2020 Update — Kafka is a stream-processing system but the idea of using it to store data isn’t uncommon. This post analyzes Kafka’s core concepts from the database perspective.

Kai Waehner

PostgreSQL Gets a Parallel Processing Boost — Swarm64 started life as a FPGA-driven way to accelerate Postgres’s performance for analytics and data warehouse tasks, but can now work without FPGAs too.

Datanami

Using SQL in RStudio

Irene Steves

A Jepsen Security Report on Dgraph 1.1.1 — Jepsen is well known for their work in putting databases and related systems through their security paces. Here, the Go-powered distributed graph database Dgraph gets analyzed.

Jepsen

MongoDB Makes Its Compass GUI Free — Compass provides a powerful interface to work with MongoDB databases. It’s source was made publicly available last year as well.

MongoDB, Inc.

eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this eBook, you will learn about the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.

pganalyze sponsor

Pantry: Free Cloud-Based Storage for JSON Data — Provides “perishable”, though secure, data storage for small projects via a RESTful API. Data is erased after a period of inactivity. There are quite a few projects like this and while they don’t suit long term production use, they can come in handy for hackathons, quick personal projects, teaching, etc.

Rohan Likhite

Liftbridge 1.0: Lightweight, Fault-Tolerant Message Streams — A server that implements a durable, replicated message log for the NATS messaging system.

Liftbridge

#303 — May 8, 2020

Read on the Web

Database Weekly

Introducing Scylla Open Source 4.0 — Scylla (a Cassandra-compatible NoSQL data store aiming to be the “world’s fastest column-store database”) now provides production-ready lightweight Transactions (LWT), a DynamoDB-compatible API (Alternator), and operator for Kubernetes, and more.

Dor Laor

The Best Medium-Hard Data Analyst SQL Interview Questions — This article begins with a quote: “The first 70% of SQL is pretty straightforward but the remaining 30% can be pretty tricky.” True! This article focuses on the tricky ‘medium-hard’ area that few tutorials venture into.

Zachary Thomas

????Live Coding: Guide to Grafana 101 - Getting Started with Alerts — Join us on May 20th to see how to use Grafana’s alerting functionality to get notified about anomalies in your data, dig into root causes, and respond to critical issues. Step-by-step demos + tips = cheaper, more flexible monitoring ✅.

Timescale sponsor

TileDB 2.0 and the Future of Data Science — TileDB is an embeddable storage engine focused on working with dense and sparse multi-dimensional arrays. It’s a C++ library with official Python, R, Java and Go integrations, but it can integrate with other database systems too. 2.0 introduces dataframe support, a new API for R, and support for Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage.

Stavros Papadopoulos

Time-Series Compression Algorithms, Explained — Delta-delta encoding, Simple-8b, XOR-based compression, and more - these algorithms aren’t magic, but combined they can save over 90% of storage costs and speed up queries. Here’s how they work.

Joshua Lockerman and Ajay Kulkarni

CockroachDB Creators Raise $87 Million of New Investment — Quite a raise and quite a valuation in these times for the creators of CockroachDB, a popular distributed SQL database.

Cockroach Labs

The Big Cloud Data Boom Gets Even Bigger, Thanks to COVID-19? — It’s not like the cloud was doing badly beforehand, but the pandemic is apparently encouraging companies to virtualize as much of their operations as possible.

Datanami

MongoDB Is Easy. Now Make It Powerful. Free Download for 30 Days. — Using MongoDB Atlas? Studio 3T is the professional GUI and IDE that unlocks the power you need.

Studio 3T sponsor

Speeding Up count(*): Why Not Use max(id) - min(id)? — A warning tale in case you decide to take this shortcut. While you might be able to estimate or fudge a number that’s close, you can’t guarantee sequences will give you an exact, correct answer here.

Hans-Jürgen Schönig

Using AWS API Gateway to Run Database Queries — API Gateway is commonly used to hook up HTTP endpoints to AWS Lambda functions but did you know it can directly connect to DynamoDB? (Or any AWS service that lets you query over the AWS API, so not RDS.)

Renato Byrro

How to Remain Agile with DynamoDB — Amazon DynamoDB delivers performance at scale but at a cost to flexibility (particularly early on in the development cycle when your eventual access patterns aren’t always known) – there are some mitigations, however.

Rob Cronin

Jobs

DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join X-Team and work on projects for companies like Riot Games, FOX, Coinbase, and more. Work from anywhere.

X-Team

Tooling

pgModeler: A Postgres Database Modeler — An easy way to create and edit database models in a visual way. It’s packaged up as a paid product but is also open source so you can build your own.

Raphael Araújo e Silva

AvionDB: A Decentralised Database with MongoDB-like Developer Interface — An admittedloy ‘alpha stage’ database system built on top of OrbitDB, a serverless, peer-to-peer database that uses IFPS for storage and implements the core decentralized database logic/protocol.

Dappkit

mssql-cli, a CLI Tool to Manage SQL Server, Now on macOS and Linux — mssql-cli is a tool for working with SQL Server from the command line, complete with Intellisense, syntax highlighting, and paging.

Alan Yu (Microsoft)