Most SQL content on the web seems to be written with data analysts in mind. And that’s fine, but developers need SQL too! Your application is only as available and performant as your database, and solid database performance doesn’t just mean knowing how to INNER JOIN or SELECT *, it also means understanding monitoring and ops commands, using EXPLAIN ANALYZE, etc.

Charlie Custer

September 21, 2023

Reliability is your most important feature. It’s easy to get bogged down in the minutiae of planning, building, and shipping new product features. But at the end of the day, if your application isn’t available (or customers are turned away by a sluggish experience), none of those features matter.

Charlie Custer

September 7, 2023

Having a reliable order management system (OMS) has always been critical to a wide variety of businesses – that’s been true since the days when taking an order or an appointment meant writing information onto a piece of paper with a rotary phone handset cradled between your ear and your neck. Most businesses are taking orders and appointments in a manner that’s much less manual and much more scalable these days, thanks to the help of third-party tools that can provide plug-and-play order management systems to handle sales, orders, inventory, appointments, and much more electronically. Life is easier, and business owners might even have less neck pain. But building those third-party systems is a high-stakes endeavour for modern tech businesses like Booksy, a global digital appointment booking service that makes it easy for customers to make appointments at beauty, health, and wellness salons. Booksy is a popular service that supported nearly 100 million bookings in 2021 across 25 different countries. But it had to overcome a massive challenge to reach that scale: modernizing outdated infrastructure while growing quickly – and without harming customer satisfaction. “Google Cloud and CockroachDB are the building blocks that we use to create a globally available platform.” - Paweł Sobkowiak, CTO, Booksy

Charlie Custer

August 31, 2023

Indexes can have a significant impact on database performance. Let’s take a look at one type that’s especially important for searching text: the inverted index.

Charlie Custer

August 17, 2023

Everyone loves a dramatic finish. And with past winners the United States now eliminated from the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, some drama is guaranteed. Will England’s women bring it home for the first time ever? Will the Netherlands avenge their 2019 finals loss? Will a nation that has never made the finals – perhaps Australia, playing at home for this tournament, or Jamaica in their first-ever survival round – grab a surprise win?

Charlie Custer

August 7, 2023

A data pipeline is a piece of software that ingests data from one or more sources, and moves that data to one or more destinations. Often, the data is transformed as part of this process to ensure that it meets the requirements of the system or systems it is being sent to.

Charlie Custer

August 2, 2023

By all accounts, multicloud is the future. And for lots of companies, multicloud is already the present. But multicloud is also a big buzzword. It’s not always clear what people even mean when they’re talking about, for example, multicloud deployments. In this article, we’ll take a look at what multicloud, hybrid cloud, and intercloud really mean. We’ll also introduce a new term, single-workload multicloud, to refer to a specific type of multicloud deployment. Finally, we’ll dig into some of the key factors to consider when trying to choose which of these deployment methods is best for you.

Charlie Custer

July 17, 2023

When it comes to choosing a database, deployment, and configuration for your most critical workloads, you’ve got plenty of options. But how can you strike the right balance between performance, resilience, and cost? Let’s take a closer look at the important factors to assess when making these decisions.

Charlie Custer

July 12, 2023

Companies move to the cloud to take advantage of a wide variety of benefits, but building your infrastructure on a public cloud also comes with risks. Chief among them is vendor lock-in and the fear of being at a single cloud provider’s mercy, locked in behind what would be the months or years of work necessary to switch to a different cloud. But operating across multiple clouds at the same time is technically difficult and often prohibitively expensive. Many companies have embraced a different way of mitigating the lock-in risk: cloud portability.

Charlie Custer

July 5, 2023