What do you do when you need the speed of a NoSQL database and the consistency of a relational database at the same time? That’s the challenge that confronted Form3, a UK-based company that provides financial institutions with easy access to managed payments infrastructure via an API, when they kicked off a new project.

Charlie Custer

September 5, 2022

Trying to choose between the three main public cloud providers – AWS, GCP, and Azure – isn’t easy. There are a lot of factors to consider, and no single cloud provider is going to be the best option for every use case. When it comes to running OLTP workloads, though, we wanted to see if any of the clouds stood out in terms of price for performance. In our 2022 Cloud Report, we ran extensive testing on 56 different instance types across the three clouds to answer that question for our customers.

Charlie Custer

August 12, 2022

It’s the second half of a tense semifinal in the World Cup. England, who haven’t won the tournament in half a century, are deadlocked with Croatia at 1-1, and time is ebbing away. The pressure is mounting.

Charlie Custer

August 4, 2022

The 2022 Cloud Report represents our deepest dive yet into how the three public clouds – AWS, GCP, and Azure – perform for OLTP applications. And while we’ve highlighted some of the most interesting findings in the report’s Insights section, the full report runs nearly 80 pages. There are many interesting details that didn’t make it into that top-level summary.

Charlie Custer

July 21, 2022

With so many things out there for an application developer to learn, we are often asked: why should I spend time learning SQL? It’s a valid question! With ORMs available to translate most popular programming languages into SQL, it’s quite possible to develop an application that uses a SQL database without actually needing to know much SQL. But there are lots of reasons why devs should still learn SQL. In fact, SQL is an important tool that can help with everything from performance optimization to debugging. Let’s take a look at just a few of the reasons why developers should learn SQL:

Charlie Custer

July 20, 2022

One of the most interesting questions we get to dig into in our annual Cloud Report is which CPUs offer the best performance – and more importantly, the best price for performance – for large OLTP workloads. To answer that question (among others) we test dozens of instance types across the three major public clouds – AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Charlie Custer

June 29, 2022

Relational databases are great for transactional workloads. But things can get messy when multiple transactions start trying to access the same data at the same time. Luckily, in many SQL databases there’s a solution for that: SELECT FOR UPDATE.

Charlie Custer

June 27, 2022

What is metadata, exactly? Metadata is data about other data. That’s a very broad definition, though. When you start trying to get specific, it can get murky pretty quickly. In our experience with our customers, we see “metadata” commonly used to describe two different sorts of use cases

Charlie Custer

June 24, 2022

The 2022 Cloud Report is finally here, and we think it was worth the wait! In this completely free 70+ report, you’ll find the results of over 3,000 OLTP test runs analyzing 56 different instance types across AWS, GCP, and Azure for performance and price, as well as hundreds of additional runs benchmarking CPU performance, network latency and throughput, and storage. Want a little taste of what’s inside? For the first time ever, we saw machines with AMD chips eclipse Intel: instance types with the latest-gen AMD Milan CPUs took the top spots for both performance and price-for-performance in our OLTP benchmarking.

Charlie Custer

June 13, 2022