Dgraph founder Manish R Jain gave us an excellent explanation of graph databases on episode 322 of The Changelog. I extracted that section from our trusty episode transcript for your reading pleasure…

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The motivation behind NearDB: While working on building edge applications for higher performance and lower latency there is a need store persistent data also on edge. There are multiple distributed database solutions but they are very involved and costly while having a much lower global footprint than a CDN. The idea came up to leverage ubiquitous and mature infrastructure like cloud storage and CDNs to deliver a persistent data solution from the edge.

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This week we talk with Manish Jain about Dgraph, graph databases, and licensing and re-licensing woes. Manish is the creator and founder Dgraph and we talked through all the details. We covered what a graph database is, the uses of a graph database, and how and when to choose a graph database over a relational database. We also talked through the hard subject of licensing/re-licensing. In this case, Dgraph has had to change their license a few times to maintain their focus on adoption while respecting the core ideas around what open source really means to developers.

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Choosing the right open source database is an important decision. Start by asking the right questions. All too often, people put the cart before the horse, making decisions before really understanding their needs. Solid tips by Barrett Chambers. Here’s another one courtesy of yours truly: Start your database selection journey by asking yourself, “Why not use PostgreSQL?” 😉

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Imagine being able to have many connections to the same database, each one reading a separate branch or commit at the same time. Or even writing to separate branches. This is a good idea and a testament to the versatility of SQLite. Click through to read how it works and how they’ve managed to 2x the performance of SQLite on Linux and macOS.

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Careful now, ‘sled’ is in its alpha stage. Heck, its name is a recursive acronym that means “sled likes eating data”, so that should give you an indication of its state (I hope they come up with a new one once the software is stable). The project’s goals are on point: don’t make the user think. the interface should be obvious. don’t surprise users with performance traps. don’t wake up operators. bring reliability techniques from academia into real-world practice. don’t use so much electricity. our data structures should play to modern hardware’s strengths.

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Dimitri Fontaine, a PostgreSQL major contributor, has written an awesome blog series on PostgreSQL data types to show how to benefit from the PostgreSQL concept of a data type. The PostgreSQL concept of a data type is more than input validation, a PostgreSQL data type also implements expected behaviors and processing functions. This allows an application developer to rely on PostgreSQL for more complex queries, having the processing happen where the data is — for instance when implementing advanced JOIN operations, then retrieving only the data set that is interesting for the application. The posts in this series were extracted from his book Mastering PostgreSQL in Application Development — which teaches SQL to developers so they can replace thousands of lines of code with very simple queries.

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Adam is on location at ZEIT Day talking with Jessica Rose about burnout, Henry Zhu about his passions and pursuit of open source, and Simon Willison about data and his passion for interesting datasets in the world.

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Matt Jaffe was on a recent episode of Go Time and also gave this talk at OSCON recently on indexes as a first class citizen. In this video Matt talks about a piece of software that’s purely an index, not a database, not a datastore, just the index — and optimizing that single piece of software to be very fast! Here’s a quick breakdown of an index as a first class citizen: Standalone application, not just a data structure Horizontally scalable, distributed FAST, indexes should make things faster Flexible, integrates with other datastores and data types Also, learn more about Pilosa to see Matt’s work in action.

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Straight from the horse’s mouth: FoundationDB is a distributed datastore, designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware. And: The key-value store supports fully global, cross-row ACID transactions. That’s the highest level of data consistency possible. What does this mean for you? Strong consistency makes your application code simpler, your data models more efficient, and your failure modes less surprising. They say it’s “actively developed and has years of production use”. I wish they’d say exactly how it’s being used in production. (Maybe they do and I haven’t found it yet?) Also, if you’re getting hung up on “key-value store”, the vision is much bigger than that.

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Matt Jaffey joined the show and talked with us about Pilosa, building distributed index with Go, and other interesting projects and news.

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Philipp Krenn joined the show to talk with us about Elasticsearch, the problem it solves, where it came from, and where it’s at today. We discussed the query language, what it can be compared to, whether or not it’s a database replacement or a database complement, Elasticsearch vs Elastic the company. We also talked about the details behind Elastic’s plan of “doubling down on open” to open up X-Pack, which is open code paid add-on features to Elasticsearch. We discussed the implications of this on their business model, and what changes will take place at the code and license level on GitHub.

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Dimitri Fontaine shares 3 classic data-modeling anti-patterns. The UUID section lacks strong argumentation, but the real gem in this article is his advice at the end. A snippet: My advice is to always normalize your database model first, and then only fix the problems you have with that when you actually have them. Well except in those 3% of cases where really, really, it should be done in the design phase of the project. It’s quite hard to recognize those 3% though, and that ability is hard gained with experience. Experience is the ultimate teacher.

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This is plugin is by Tim Pope (the unofficial pope of Vim plugins), so the chances of it being high quality are… high. It supports the typical RDBMSes (Pg, MySQL, Sqlite) as well as a few NoSQL flavors (Mongo, Redis).

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If this is a repeat for you, then pay no attention. I was recently introduced to this tool by @jerodsanto who logged this awhile back when he found it. 💫 If you’re on macOS you don’t want to open up Numbers to fiddle with a .csv file — that’s why Jakob Egger, the creator of Egger Apps, created it. Download it on the Mac App Store.

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What do you use when your app needs to provide speed and availability to a global audience? You need a distributed database that… Deploys anywhere Reduces latency by performing reads and writes close to users (while still enforcing consistency, even across a distributed deployment) Maintains uptime by tolerating faults Offers granular control over geographical placement of your data for GDPR compliance Sounds like a CDN.

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Craig Kerstiens put out a tweet the other day, asking: Whats your favorite hidden gem of Postgres that you wish more people knew about? The list of resulting hidden gems is… long. Thankfully, he aggregated them in a nice, readable, off-Twitter format. Give it a scan, you’re sure to learn something new.

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Randall Degges examines the good and bad uses of Local Storage. tldr, don’t use it to store sensitive data. Almost every day I stumble across a new website storing sensitive user information in local storage and it bothers me to know that so many developers are opening themselves up to catastrophic security issues by doing so. Let’s have a heart-to-heart and talk about local storage and why you should stop using it to store session data.

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If so, then this Twitter thread should be a great read for you. If you’re avoiding services like DynamoDB/Datastore/Spanner/SQS/PubSub out of fear of lock in, remember that managing Cassandra, Kafka, ZooKeeper, etc yourself is also lock in. 💣.

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This framework is very much in the proof of concept stage. There’s still a lot to do. The framework provides a seamless GraphQL interface for Rust servers. It is type-safe, ergonomic, very low boilerplate, and customizable. It has potential to be very fast. I believe that it can be one of the best experiences for GraphQL development in any language, as well as one of the fastest implementations (in part, because it seems to me that Rust and GraphQL are a great fit). Also, check out ~> 2018: The year we learn Rust 1.0 and Rust in 2018

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We went back into the archives to conversations we had around blockchains and databases at OSCON 2017. We talked with Monty Widenius (creator of MariaDB), Brian Behlendorf (Executive Director of Hyperledger), and Tague Griffith (Head of Developer Advocacy at Redis Labs). Business Source License (BSL) is there to be a bridge between closed source and open source. - Monty Widenius

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Another gem by typicode a small local JSON database powered by Lodash (supports Node, Electron and the browser)

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Mike Glukhovsky joined the show to talk about the future of RethinkDB. Mike was a co-founder of RethinkDB along-side Slava Akhmechet. RethinkDB shutdown a year ago officially on October 5, 2016 — and today we’re talking through all the details with Mike. The shutdown, getting purchased by the CNCF, relicensing, buying back their IP and source code, community and governance, and some specific features that Mike and the rest of the community are excited about.

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Mark Nadal joined the show to talk about his hacker story and his venture backed open source datastore project called GunDB — a realtime, decentralized, offline-first, graph database engine. We talked about the details behind this database, how Mark secured funding, why yet another datastore, who’s using the database, how Mark plans to sustain this project through products and services, his thoughts on the RethinkDB postmortem and more.

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This week we talked with Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, about its history, where it came from, why it succeeded as a database, how it’s development is sustainably funded, and how it’s the most widely deployed database engine in the world.

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