in

US shopping centres re-open: 'This is the best day ever'

In states like Texas, malls can operate at a 25% capacity and for some, it's a reason to get out of the house.




in

'Definitely not the real thing': why eracers can't go from the bedroom to the cockpit

With more and more F1 drivers making the move to esports during the lockdown and doing well, could an expert sim racer easily make the leap the other way?




in

Atletico Ottawa - how the Canadian club conceived in Spain is preparing to make its debut

Fan clubs, players from all over the world and a former Spain international in charge, Atletico Madrid's Canadian venture is currently on pause.




in

Souza out of UFC 249 after testing positive for coronavirus

UFC middleweight Jacaré Souza tests positive for Covid-19 and will no longer compete at the controversial UFC 49 show.




in

'I feel fresher and healthier' - Hamilton enjoying parts of F1 break

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton says he feels certain benefits from his enforced time away from Formula 1.




in

How Florian Schneider and Kraftwerk influenced five decades of music

The band's influence can be heard in everything from art-rock and hip-hop to trance and house.




in

Can robotaxis ease public transport fears in China?

More self-driving cabs are being launched in China at a time when people are worried about public transport.




in

Coronavirus: Seed sales soar as more of us become budding gardeners

The lockdown has led to huge growth in the number of people buying garden seeds.




in

India coronavirus: Why celebrating Covid-19 'success models' is dangerous

Experts tell the BBC that euphoria over success models runs the risk of people becoming complacent.




in

Dateci Voce: Italian women demand voice in Covid-19 fight

Women post selfies demanding more representation in official bodies dealing with Covid-19.




in

Coronavirus: How is Suffolk's Little America coping in lockdown?

How are the communities that rely so heavily on the US airbases coping under lockdown?




in

Coronavirus: Belarus WW2 parade defies pandemic and upstages Putin

Belarus goes ahead with a Victory Day parade but in Russia coronavirus forced its cancellation.




in

Quiz of the Week: What's in a (baby) name for Elon Musk?

How closely have you been paying attention to what's been going on during the past seven days?




in

Africa's week in pictures: 1 - 7 May 2020

A selection of the week's best photos from across the continent and beyond.




in

Week in pictures: 2-8 May 2020

A selection of news photographs taken around the world this week.




in

Coronavirus: How they tried to curb Spanish flu pandemic in 1918

Face masks, fresh air and porridge - how people tried to curb a deadly flu pandemic in 1918.




in

The flamboyant life of 'King and Queen of rock 'n' roll'

The self-styled "king and queen of rock 'n' roll" - who inspired Elvis and The Beatles - dies at 87.




in

Trump laments ‘heart-breaking' killing

The 25-year-old was jogging in Georgia when he was shot dead, in a video the president described as disturbing.




in

Coronavirus: Tesla ordered to keep main US plant closed

It reportedly planned to re-open on Friday, but authorities say this could lead to more virus cases.




in

UK 'to bring in 14-day quarantine' for air passengers

An airline industry body says it has been told coronavirus quarantining will start from the end of May.




in

Coronavirus: Andy Serkis reads entire Hobbit live online for charity

More than 650,000 watch the Gollum actor narrate Tolkien's fantasy classic in one 11-hour sitting.




in

Magician Roy Horn dies after catching coronavirus

He and his stage partner Siegfried Fischbacher were one of the longest-running acts in Las Vegas.




in

Coronavirus: China offers to help North Korea fight pandemic

President Xi Jinping expresses concern about the threat to its neighbour, and offers to help.




in

Coronavirus: Far-right spreads Covid-19 'infodemic' on Facebook

An investigation details how extremists are trying to exploit the pandemic via the social network.




in

Love Bug's creator tracked down to repair shop in Manila

Two decades after the world's first major computer virus, an author finds the perpetrator in Manila.




in

Coronavirus: Can live-streaming save China's economy?

In China, the live-streaming industry has become an important platform for economic recovery.




in

Coronavirus: How does contact tracing work and is my data safe?

Millions in the UK will soon be asked to download an app that helps to limit coronavirus spreading.




in

Coronavirus: 'Phone apps helped me spend time with my dying mum'

Andrew's mother was dying in hospital under lockdown, so he used technology to spend time with her.




in

Coronavirus: Ghana's dancing pallbearers become Covid-19 meme

Social media users have adopted the troupe as a dark-humoured symbol of death in the time of Covid-19.




in

Covid-19: Investigating the spread of fake coronavirus news

In a joint investigation BBC Click investigates the groups behind fake news about the pandemic.




in

Life inside the UK's first 'TikTok house'

These six creators moved in together to make viral TikTok videos.




in

Couples get married in virtual wedding ceremonies

Video calling technology is helping people share their special day with others during lockdown.




in

Coronavirus contact-tracing: World split between two types of app

The UK is testing its own design but a Google-Apple initiative is winning over many other nations.




in

Coronavirus: Scam sites selling masks and fake cures taken down

More than 160,000 suspicious emails have been reported to a new scam-busting service in two weeks.




in

Coronavirus: Google ends plans for smart city in Toronto

Sister firm Sidewalk Labs cites Covid-19 as the reason for stepping back from its ambitious plan.




in

Facebook and Google extend working from home to end of year

The tech giants plan to re-open offices soon but will allow staff to work remotely throughout 2020.




in

Coronavirus: NHS reveals source code behind contact-tracing app

More than 40,000 people have downloaded the contact tracing app so far, ahead of a wider release.




in

RTX Voice: Noise-destroying tech put to the test

Two noise-cancelling AI systems - Nvidia RTX Voice and Krisp - are put to the test.




in

Are Object Stores Starting to Look Like Databases?

#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.. ????




in

Things that more developers should know about databases

#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 RustRedisJSON 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




in

Belsen 1945: Remembering the medical students who saved lives

Two weeks after liberation, 95 London medical students arrived at Belsen to help care for survivors.




in

Coronavirus: How do you social distance in schools?

If pupils are allowed to return to school after the lockdown, how would they keep 2m apart?




in

‘Justice not charity’ - the blind marchers who made history

Remembering the maverick blind campaigners who walked to London a century ago to demand equality.




in

Lockdown homeschooling: The parents who have forgotten what they learned at school

Parents have been turning to Google to help them teach the things they’ve forgotten.




in

Coronavirus: Online students face full tuition fees

If universities are teaching online next term students will still have to pay full tuition fees.




in

Coronavirus: Concerns for wellbeing of babies born in lockdown

New mothers are missing out on support for their babies amidst lockdown restrictions.




in

Coronavirus: Schools in Wales not reopening on 1 June

The situation for schools in Wales will not change on 1 June, the education minister says.




in

Students 'being ignored' over fee-refund claim

MPs consider a petition signed by 330,000, asking for students to get money back on fees this year.




in

Coronavirus: When might Hollywood reopen for business?

Cast and crews might have to quarantine together in the future when filming begins again.




in

Coronavirus: Thanking healthcare workers worldwide

Some of the ways that people have expressed thanks to workers on the frontline against Covid-19.