Ticketmaster was recently in the news after a major system meltdown when tickets for Taylor Swift’s latest concert tour went on sale. Response from Taylor Swift’s listenership — a population of such size and economic influence it probably qualifies for its own spot in the United Nations — crashed the ticket sales platform under the sheer weight of demand. Thousands of furious fans vented their frustration on social media as they waited for hours in a virtual buying queue, only to be kicked out. Others finally got in, only to watch tickets disappear from their carts before they could check out.

Michelle Gienow

July 31, 2023

My current employer uses sharded and replicated Postgres via RDS. Even basic things like deploying schema changes to every shard are an unbelievable pain in the ass, and changing the number of shards on a major database is a high-touch, multi-day operation. After having worked with Spanner in the past, it’s like going back to the stone age, like we’re only a step above babysitting individual machines in a closet. Nobody should do this. — HackerNews user GeneralMayhem

Michelle Gienow

April 12, 2023

Lt. Grace Hopper at the programming console for the Mark I computer, 1944. Programming the Mark I required feeding in long rolls of paper punched with holes that the computer translated into instructions. Back in the days before startups and GitHub and nerds being cool — long before the Internet, and only shortly after there were “computing machines” at all — Grace Hopper was the first person to see that these room-sized citadels of circuitry could do more than mathematical calculations. Grace Hopper theorized and then wrote the first compiler, essentially “teaching” computers to speak English and thereby ushering in the world of computing that we know today.

Michelle Gienow

December 8, 2022

When new technologies arise we first adopt them for their technical value. If that value proves out, then we reach the magic “crossing the chasm” moment: when a technology jumps to widespread adoption through proven business value and goes mainstream. Some technologies, a very select few, make one more jump forward, however — from mainstream to existential imperative.

Michelle Gienow

September 22, 2022

Star Wars and SQL began together. In 1977, the first (eventually fourth) Star Wars film debuted in theaters. In that same year an emerging English language-based structured query language for data, originally called SEQUEL, was renamed to SQL*. For the Rebellion, it was A New Hope to fight the Empire. For the rest of us, it was the birth of a nifty little world-changing technology known as the relational database.

Michelle Gienow

July 22, 2022

Tomorrow, as you undoubtedly know, is day-one of an annual two-day retail event known as “Amazon Prime Day”. Two days of frenetic consumerism that stress Amazon’s architecture in much the same way that Black Friday and Cyber Monday stress the whole retail industry. In 2018 Amazon’s site served a 404 error for hours on Prime Day. But there’s no need to pick on Amazon…J. Crew, Macy’s, H&M, Lowes and others have all endured costly downtime during peak traffic. Three years of masks and stay-at-home mandates forced users to online shopping and forced retailers to scale their online operations to serve unprecedented customer volume. Some even had to establish their first-ever digital presence in order to survive widespread lockdowns that shuttered physical retailers. Survivability established, next came the need to meet equally unrelenting customer demands for fast and personalized user experiences across a vast spectrum of digital devices and platforms. Now elastic scalability, sophisticated personalization, and a seamless omnichannel experience are simply table stakes for modern retail organizations. That’s why choosing the right database infrastructure has become a business imperative. Not just to support surging high-transaction workloads, but also to ensure survival in the face of several dire trends facing retailers today.

Michelle Gienow

July 11, 2022

We depend on financial companies and services to help us navigate just about everything — to the point where they’re basically a form of critical infrastructure, at least existentially speaking. (Try to imagine getting through the rest of your day right now if your credit card froze or your financial services were suddenly unavailable. Do you have enough cash on you to buy lunch, or a ticket/tank of gas to drive home?). In such a complex and far-reaching sector, there are many ways things can go wrong. And, unfortunately, as your platform/application/services grow, the number of possible stress points scales right along with them.

Michelle Gienow

June 23, 2022

For operators, architects and developers alike, data domiciling can be one tough technical nemesis. Privacy regulations like GDPR create strict requirements where data can live in the world. To meet these requirements companies traditionally had to run separate databases in different geographic regions. This results in a huge operational overhead and reliability also takes a hit, since it can be hard to guarantee region survival while complying with data domiciling restrictions.

Michelle Gienow

June 13, 2022

When you deploy a web application in the cloud, you typically select a region for your cloud resources first — a region being the physical datacenter location where your cloud-based application will live. It’s common to choose just one region, but you can also stitch multiple regions together. Why would you choose multi-region architecture? Three words: resiliency, latency and localization.

Michelle Gienow

May 23, 2022