#300 — April 17, 2020

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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.. ????

#351 — April 15, 2020

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Postgres Weekly

A Detailed Look at pg_show_plans — A few issues ago we linked to a basic introduction to pg_show_plans – this goes a little further. pg_show_plans lets you look at the execution plans of slow queries in real time as they’re being executed which can help you when troubleshooting.

Kaarel Moppel

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

Online Training: Learn PostgreSQL from Home — The remote PostgreSQL Database Administration training course is available at a discounted rate & will be conducted in two different timezones. The course covers day-to-day DBA operations, monitoring, server configurations, and more.

2ndQuadrant PostgreSQL Training sponsor

PostgreSQL's 'Related Projects' — Thanks to Andreas Scherbaum for pointing out a new page on the Postgres site dedicated to projects related to Postgres like the code that runs the Postgres web site, mailing list, build farm, package management system, etc.

PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Authentication Configuration in Postgres (and CockroachDB) — In Postgres, client authentication can be controlled via a ‘HBA’ (host-based authentication) file. It’s not something we see covered very often, so you might find this interesting, particularly as it compares things against CockroachDB.

Raphael ‘kena’ Poss

▶  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

How To Set Up an Express API Backend Project With Postgres — A pretty extensive walkthrough of creating an HTTP API using Express with Node.js and Postgres on the backend, then deploying it all on Heroku.

Chidi Orji

A Beginners Guide to Basic Indexing in Postgres

James Bannister

eBook: The Most Important Events to Monitor in Your Postgres Logs — In this eBook, we are looking at the Top 6 Postgres log events for monitoring query performance and preventing downtime.

pganalyze sponsor

Documenting the Citus Extension to Postgres: An Interview with Joe Nelson — Joe, a.k.a. begriffs, talks about why he works on documentation, why the multi-tenant and real-time analytics tutorials matter, the INSERT..SELECT with repartitioning feature, and what development platform Citus uses for docs.

Citus Data (Microsoft)

Procedural vs Query Approaches for Finding Packages — Explorations of a query that can be used to display which packages are available for a given FreeBSD port. Get your head around the data model and the ideas here apply to all sorts of situations.

Dan Langille

???? Seen on Twitter

Saw this tweet and thought it was a pretty neat reminder of the sorts of things we can do with Postgres. Justin kindly let us include it:

Click through to the original tweet if you want to see the code better. Neat use for a generated column!

#354 — May 6, 2020

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Postgres Weekly

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

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

Monitor Custom Postgres Metrics in Real-Time with Datadog — Monitor and visualize Postgres performance in context end-to-end alongside the rest of your stack. Create custom, drag-and-drop dashboards to quickly view analytics on any Postgres metric. Try Datadog free.

Datadog sponsor

My Favorite PostgreSQL Extensions: Part Two — The second part of a series we linked to last week. This time, Nawaz takes a look at pgAudit, pg_repack, and HypoPG.

Nawaz Ahmed

Backup Manifests and pg_verifybackup in Postgres 13 — Postgres 13 will introduce two features to enhance the automated validation of physical backups: backup manifests and a new tool called pg_verifybackup.

Gabriele Bartolini

arm64 Packages Now on apt.postgresql.org — If you’re running ARM64 hardware and Debian or Ubuntu, you can now install Postgres via apt.

Christoph Berg

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 Postgres 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

How to Migrate From Inheritance-Based Partitioning to Declarative Partitioning — Partitioning was introduced in Postgres 10 and Postgres 11 improved the declarative partitioning support. This article demonstrates a move from inheritance based partitioning to declarative partitioning using the native features found in Postgres 11+.

Caterina Magini

Free eBook: How to Get a 3x Performance Improvement on Your Postgres Database — Learn our best practices for optimizing Postgres query performance for customers like Atlassian and how to reduce data loaded from disk by 500x.

pganalyze sponsor

How to Backup Multiple Tablespaces with pg_basebackup

Ahsan Hadi

▶  Security and Compliance with Postgres — A recorded webinar that 2ndQuadrant ran recently.

Boriss Mejías

Oracle to PostgreSQL: ANSI Outer Join Syntax in Postgres — The latest in a series of blog posts about migrating to Postgres from Oracle which looks at what Postgres offers in place of Oracle’s join operators.

Kirk Roybal

An Interview with 2ndQuadrant's Jimmy Angelakos — The latest ‘PostgreSQL Person of the Week’ to face questions about his experiences with Postgres.

Andreas Scherbaum

dadbod.vim: A Modern Database Interface for Vim — A Vim plugin for interacting with numerous databases, including Postgres.

Tim Pope

#497 — April 16, 2020

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Ruby Weekly

Bye Bye Ruby 2.4, Support Has Ended — From the end of April 2019 till now, Ruby 2.4 has been in its ‘security maintenance’ phase but now you won’t even get that, Ruby 2.4.10 should be the final 2.4 release. 2.5 will follow in 2.4’s footsteps next year, so upgrading to 2.6 or 2.7 should now be a priority for those older apps.

Ruby Core Team

Testing Ruby Decorators with super_method — Have you ever wondered how you can properly test the behavior of a method overridden by Module#prepend? Enter super_method which returns a Method object of which superclass method would be called when super is used or nil if none exists.

Simone Bravo

You Hacked the Gibson? Yeah, They Built Their Own Login — Don't let Crash Override pwn your app. FusionAuth adds secure login, registration and user management to your app in minutes not months. Download our community edition for free.

FusionAuth sponsor

Heya: A Sequence Mailer for Rails — “Think of it like ActionMailer, but for timed email sequences.” Note: It’s open source but not free for commercial use beyond a certain point.

Honeybadger Industries LLC

A Final Report on Ruby Concurrency Developments — A report on work funded by a 2019 Ruby Association Grant that puts forth a proposal of using non-blocking fibers to improve Ruby’s concurrency story.

Samuel Williams

Mocking in Ruby with Minitest — Minitest has basic mocking functionality baked in, but be judicious in your use of it.

Heidar Bernhardsson

???? Jobs

Ruby Backend Developer (Austria) — We’re seeking mid-level and senior devs to join us and build top-class backend infrastructure for our adidas apps, used by millions. Our stack includes: jRuby, Sinatra, Sidekiq, MySQL, & MongoDB.

Runtastic

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

Vettery

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

???? Articles & Tutorials

Predicting the Future With Linear Regression in Ruby — Linear regression is a mathematical approach to modelling a relationship between multiple variables and is demonstrated here by exploring whether the tempo of a song predicts its popularity on Spotify.

Julie Kent

Feature Flags: A Simple Way to 'De-Stress' Production Releases — Feature flags bridge a gap between the abstract concept of continuous delivery and tactical release of features.

Matt Swanson

A Guide to Deprecation Warnings in Rails — If you’ve upgraded Rails and you start seeing warnings screaming at you, you can either get Googling or.. read this ????

Luciano Becerra

What's the Difference Between Monitoring Webhooks and Background Jobs

AppSignal sponsor

Understanding webpacker.yml — Have you ever really gone through the Webpack config?

Ross Kaffenberger

Using Optimizer Hints in Rails — Rails 6 removes the need to write raw SQL to use optimizer hints, so that’s cool.

Prateek Choudhary

Dissecting Rails Migrations — You should pick up something new about migrations by reading this article as it covers all of the essentials and a little more.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

The Basics of Custom Exception Handling — Never hurts to revise the basics of effective exceptions.

Mark Michon

How to Improve Code Readability with Closures

Andrey Koleshko

???? Code and Tools

ruby-prolog: A Pure Ruby Prolog-like DSL for Logical Programming — Solve complex logic problems on the fly using a dynamic, Prolog-like DSL inline with your normal code.

Preston Lee

Anyway Config: Keep Your Ruby Configuration Sensible — Get your Ruby project out of ‘ENV Hell’ with anyway_config, a framework for managing configuration.

Vladimir Dementyev

The End of Heroku Alerts — Rails Autoscale keeps your app healthy. Simple and effective autoscaling for Web, Sidekiq, Delayed Job, and Que.

Rails Autoscale sponsor

Tomo 1.0: A Friendly CLI for Deploying Rails Apps — There’s a short tutorial for deploying Rails, and the documentation is thorough.

Matt Brictson

ActiveLdap 6.0: An Object Oriented Interface to LDAP — A very long standing project (16 years!) that has just had an update. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and while I don’t hear about it much anymore, it has plenty of established use cases.

Sutou Kouhei

Elasticsearch Integrations for ActiveModel/Record and Rails

Elastic

RubyMine 2020.1 Released

Natalie Kudanova

#498 — April 23, 2020

Read on the Web

Ruby Weekly

Mining for Malicious Ruby Gems: 700+ Gems Affected — Breathe easy as this was all resolved a month ago (and was too obscure to pay off for the hackers anyway) but a security research team recently found over 700 malicious Ruby gems that were subtle typos/adjustments of more popular gems (e.g. atlas-client vs atlas_client – could you tell which one is real?)

Tomislav Maljic

You Can Now Sponsor Matz on GitHub — I appreciate these are challenging times, but if you’ve ever wanted to give a big thank you to Matz, the creator of Ruby, here’s one way to do it. We’re sponsoring Matz now as without him, this newsletter wouldn’t exist! ???? Alternatively, if you have little to spare, maybe send him a thanks on Twitter?

GitHub Sponsors

Ruby Performance Tips — Here’s a collection of practical tips for improving Ruby performance for better user experiences, brought to you by Raygun. Read the tips here.

Raygun sponsor

Full Text Search in Milliseconds with Rails and Postgres — If you’ve never played with full text search with Postgres and Rails, this is a fine place to start. It covers LIKE/ILIKE, trigrams, and ‘proper’ full text searching. We also get to see how Leigh took a query from taking 130ms down to 7ms.

Leigh Halliday

▶  Introduction to Stimulus Reflex — Stimiulus Reflex makes SPA-type interactions very simple by using ActionCable to render pages and then diffing them on the client.

GoRails

Rails Performance: When is Caching the Right Choice? — Before you say “always”, understand that caching is not free and, if done incorrectly, can even make things worse.

Jonathan Miles

???? 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

Ruby Backend Developer (Austria) — We’re seeking mid-level and senior devs to join us and build top-class backend infrastructure for our adidas apps, used by millions. Our stack includes: jRuby, Sinatra, Sidekiq, MySQL, & MongoDB.

Runtastic

???? Articles & Tutorials

How to Customize Webpack in Rails Apps — How to go about configuring webpack when tweaking webpacker.yml just isn’t enough.

Ross Kaffenberger

RSpec Given/When/Then with Symbols — An interesting, alternative way to structure a BDD feature in RSpec. I think I prefer the underscores but YMMV.

Caius Durling

Looking Inside a Ruby Gem — Piotr decomposes a .gem file which turns out to just be a collection of gzipped and tarred files, only some of which are the code.

Piotr Murach

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

Passing Rails Controller Params to Sidekiq — ActionController::Parameters can give Sidekiq issues.

Prathamesh Sonpatki

Catchup Subscriptions with Rails Event Store

Miroslaw Praglowski

Logic-less Ruby Templates with Mustache

David Santangelo

▶  Discussing Ruby for Good with Sean Marcia — Sean talks about founding Ruby For Good (an event about philanthropic Ruby development) and some of the projects it has been responsible for creating.

Ruby Rogues podcast

???? Code and Tools

Impressionist 2.0: A Plugin to Log Impressions in Rails Apps — Impressionist tracks page views and impressions. v2.0 has just dropped but they’re also are looking for new maintainers, so contact them if you want to get involved.

Charlotte Ruby Group

acli 0.3: A Command Line Client for Action Cable — Interesting on two fronts.. first, because it’s an mruby app, and we don’t see many of those, and second, because it lets you play with Action Cable channels in any easier way.

Vladimir Dementyev

Undercover: A Tool to Stop You Shipping Untested Code — It’s like RuboCop but for code coverage rather than code style.

Jan Grodowski

How to Monitor Your Host Metrics Automatically

AppSignal sponsor

Bridgetown: A Modern Ruby (JAMstack) Web Framework — Bridgetown is a new Ruby-based static-site generator based on a fork of Jekyll. It supports plugins and Webpack, so you can use your front-end framework of choice.

Bridgetown

net-ssh 6.0: A Pure Ruby Implementation of the SSH2 Client Protocol — Yes, you can write programs that invoke and interact with processes on remote servers, via SSH2, all in Ruby.

Buck, Fazekas, et al.

#334 — April 16, 2020

Read on the Web

Node Weekly

npm Has Now (Actually) Joined GitHub — We announced GitHub’s acquisition of npm a month ago but now the process is complete. Not much real news here but the plan is to now focus on community engagement and improving registry infrastructure.

Jeremy Epling (GitHub)

Node v13.13.0 (Current) Released — fs.readv is a new function to sequentially read from an array of ArrayBufferViews, util.inspect now lets you specify a maximum length for printed strings, the default maximum HTTP header size has been increased to 16KB, there are three new collaborators, and more.

Michaël Zasso

Get Better Insight into Redis with RedisGreen — Modern hosting and monitoring services include memory usage maps, seamless scaling, key size tracking, and more.

RedisGreen sponsor

▶  Watch the Live Coding of a New Feature for Node.js — This is not something for novices, but if the idea of watching ‘over the shoulder’ of a Node.js collaborator implementing a new feature directly into Node itself interests you.. this could be a valuable hour spent.

Vladimir de Turckheim

node-libcurl 2.1: libcurl Bindings for Node — libcurl is a very powerful and well established way to fetch data from URLs across numerous protocols. node-libcurl 2.1.0 brings support for the latest version of libcurl (7.69.1) to us in the Node world.

Jonathan Cardoso Machado

npm's CTO: 'So Long, and Thanks for All The Packages!' — Ahmad Nassri was npm’s CTO but has now left. Here, he reflects on the past ten years of npm, the repo, the company, and the achievements of both.

Ahmad Nassri

???? 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

Node.js Developer 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

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

???? Tutorials

Working With AWS Route 53 from Node — Route 53 is Amazon Web Services’ suite of DNS-related services. Like every AWS service, you can control it via an API, and here’s how to manipulate hosted zones from Node.

Valeri Karpov

Best Practices Learnt Running Express.js in Production for 4 Years — There’s a lot of stuff packed in here focused around middleware, testing, logging, and general concerns around scaling and keeping apps running in production.

Adnan Rahić

The Node.js Security Handbook — Improve the security of your Node.js app with the Node.js security handbook made for developers.

Sqreen sponsor

How To Set Up an Express API Backend Project with PostgreSQL — A pretty extensive walkthrough of creating an HTTP API using Express with Node.js and Postgres on the backend, then deploying it all on Heroku.

Chidi Orji

Porting to TypeScript Solved Our API Woes — From the guy behind the (in)famous Wat video comes a tale of porting a backend from Ruby to TypeScript.

Gary Bernhardt

How to Mass Rename Files in Node

Flavio Copes

▶  Let's Build a Digital Circuit Simulator In JavaScript — A special episode of the Low Level JavaScript series takes us on a brief journey into the world of digital logic.

Low Level JavaScript

The Story of How I Created a Way to Port Windows Apps to Linux — We mentioned ElectronCGI recently as a way to let .NET and Node.js code depend upon each other, but here its creator explains more about the how and why.

Rui Figueiredo

How to Create an Alexa Skill with Node — Implementing a custom ‘skill’ for Amazon Alexa by using Node and AWS Lambda.

Xavier Portilla Edo

???? Tools, Resources and Libraries

Node v10.20.1 (LTS) Released — If you’re still using Node 10, don’t use v10.20.0, use this, due to a bug in the .0 release.

Bethany Nicolle Griggs

emoji-regex: A Regular Expression to Match All Emoji-Only Symbols

Mathias Bynens

ip-num: A Library to Work with ASN, IPv4, and IPv6 Numbers — Happy in both Node and the browser.

dadepo

Optimize Node.js Performance with Distributed Tracing in Datadog

Datadog APM sponsor

verify-json: Verify JSON Using a Lightweight Schema — A lighter weight alternative to something like JSON Schema.

Yusuf Bhabhrawala

middle-manager: A Lightweight 'No BS' Presentation Tool — A bit of humor, really. It turns Markdown into basic presentations but then the magic is it detects your ‘BS’ business language so you can remove it ????

Anders