Notes about Cutting-Edge Technologies and Everything

PostgreSQL is a big deal. The most common SQL open source database that you have never heard of, as ZDNet's own Tony Baer called it. Besides being the framework on which a number of commercial offerings were built, PostgreSQL has a user base of its own. According to DB Engines, PostgreSQL is the 4th most popular database in the world. Swarm64, on the other hand, is a small vendor. So small, actually, that we have shared the stage with CEO Thomas Richter in a local Berlin Meetup a few years back. Back then, Richter was not CEO, and Swarm64 was even smaller. But its value proposition still sounded attractive: boost PostgreSQL's performance for free. Swarm64 is an acceleration layer for PostgreSQL. There's no such thing as a free lunch of course, so the "for free" part is a figure of speech. Swarm64 is a commercial vendor. Until recently, however, the real gotcha was hardware: Swarm64 Database Acceleration (DA) required a specialized chip called FPGA to be able ...

Bruce Momjian prepared this slide deck describing the most significant improvements coming to PostgreSQL 12 .

Dr. Martin Kleppmann is a researcher in distributed systems at the University of Cambridge, and the author of the highly acclaimed “Designing Data-Intensive Applications” (O’Reilly Media, 2017). Kevin Scott, CTO at Microsoft once said: “This book should be required reading for software engineers. Designing Data-Intensive Applications is a rare resource that connects theory and practice to help developers make smart decisions as they design and implement data infrastructure and systems.” Martin’s main research interests include collaboration software, CRDTs, and formal verification of distributed algorithms. Previously he was a software engineer and an entrepreneur at several Internet companies including LinkedIn and Rapportive, where he worked on large-scale data infrastructure. Vadim Tsesko (@incubos) is a lead software engineer at Odnoklassniki who works in Core Platform team. Vadim’s scientific and engineering interests include distributed systems, data warehouses and verification o...

To gather insights on the current and future state of open source software (OSS), we talked to 31 executives. This is nearly double the number we speak to for a research guide and believe this reiterates the popularity of, acceptance of, and demand for OSS. We began by asking, "What Open Source software do you use?" As you would expect, most respondents are using several versions of open source software. Here's what they told us: Apache Apache Cassandra, Elassandra  (ElasticSearch + Cassandra) , Spark, and Kafka  (as the core tech we provide through our managed service) are the big ones for us. We find that the governance arrangements and independence of the Apache Foundation make a great foundation for strong open source projects. 95% of what we do with big data is open source. We use  Apache Hadoop  and contribute back to grow skills and expertise. We use so much that it would be impossible to list. The core of our software is based on  Apache So...

Interesting article about Datomic and its immutability with regard to MVCC databases. https://www.xaprb.com/blog/2013/12/28/immutability-mvcc-and-garbage-collection/