featured in #408
The Inner Workings Of Distributed Databases
- Alex Pelagenko tl;dr: “We analyze how several popular time-series / OLAP databases implement high availability to highlight the pros and cons of each approach.” Alex also reviews the fundamentals of distributed databases.featured in #407
featured in #401
From Postgres To Amazon DynamoDB
tl;dr: From the engineering team at Instacart, who have to manage and efficiently store and query hundreds of terabytes of data. The primary datastore of choice was Postgres - but once specific use cases began to outpace the largest Amazon EC2 instance size AWS offers - they chose Amazon DynamoDB. Here they discuss migrating existing tables from Postgres to DynamoDB.featured in #394
Database Cryptography Fur The Rest Of Us
tl;dr: The author defines database cryptography, how it manifests for both relational and NoSQL databases, searchable encryption, and provides a case study of MongoDB’s Client-Side encryption.featured in #394
In-Depth: ClickHouse vs PostgreSQL
- Mathew Pregasen tl;dr: "Most companies that invest in an online analytical processing (OLAP) database like ClickHouse originally used an online transaction processing (OLTP) stack like MySQL or Postgres." Despite the two being built for different purposes, most companies leverage features in both during their scaling period. The author compares the two technologies here.featured in #372
Things You Should Know About Databases
- Mahdi Yusuf tl;dr: "So, without fully getting into the weeds on database-specific quirks, I will cover everything you should understand about RDBMS indexes. I will touch briefly on transactions and isolation levels and how they can impact your reasoning about specific transactions."featured in #366
Atomic Commitment: The Unscalability Protocol
- Marc Brooker tl;dr: Marc describes the classic CS problem Atomic Commitment. "The classic solution to this classic problem is Two-phase commit, maybe the most famous of all distributed protocols. There's a lot we could say about atomic commitment, or even just about two-phase commit. In this post, I'm going to focus on just one aspect: Atomic Commitment has weird scaling behavior."featured in #360
Soft Deletion Probably Isn't Worth It
tl;dr: "The concept behind soft deletion is to make deletion safer, and reversible. Once a record’s been hit by a hard DELETE, it may technically still be recoverable by digging down into the storage layer, but suffice it to say that it’s really hard to get back."featured in #336
The Day I Wiped A Production Database Table
- Paul Boyd tl;dr: "I was 6-months into my first real developer job, trying to fix a bug. Our application would sometimes insert rows with an invalid “foreign key.” Of course, the bug was only seen in production, so I had a production MySQL shell open to see the bad rows."featured in #323