Articles on Database
Problematic Terminology in Open-Source
It remains a common practice in database systems today to refer to configurations where one database is a source of truth, and another database is a replica that follows the state of the source of truth database as a “master/slave” configuration. Use of this term is problematic. It references slavery to convey meaning about the …
There will be SQL
I recently worked on my first Go project. As a web developer, the applications I work with are often database driven. If you are like me, you might be curious about what working with a database is like in Go. And if you're used to working with a web framework like Rails, you might be …
Adventures in Searching with Postgres: Part 2
In part one, we looked at querying 100,000 International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) code records for 3-7 character codes. In part two of three, we’ll cover full-text search of the record descriptions using Postgres and Arel.
Adventures in Searching with Postgres: Part 1
For a recent project, we built a live-search for over 60,000 records which used both simple pattern matching and full-text search. The records we needed to search were diagnoses that are used to assign patients to a therapy. I had never done full-text search or anything real-time with that many records, so I ended up …
RethinkDB: a Qualitative Review
At Carbon Five we install and use many different database engines. Document-oriented databases are proving to be a good fit for more and more of our projects. MongoDB is the most popular of these and provides a powerful set of tools to store and query data, but it’s been plagued by performance problems when used …
Using Redis sorted sets to build a scalable real-time web waiting list.
As websocket communication makes large real-time web experiences more common, we are increasingly faced with the problem of how to build apps that work just as well with many concurrent users as they do with a few. The problem touches both the technical limits of the server infrastructure and the design of the user experience. …
PostgreSQL: Aggregates, Medians, and a Brief Command Reference
Recently, I have been working with analytics in PostgreSQL. Often I hit the database through Ruby on Rails’ ActiveRecord ORM. But with the tens of millions of rows I needed to crunch for analytics, I achieved significantly better performance and clearer code by writing raw SQL. Here’s a compilation of things I learned or used …