Learn from memes is a working strategy!

Therefore, I’d like to share with you this article (quite a long one) that describes a Postgres meme.

So, you could learn its concept broken down by a “level of depths”.

#databases #postgres

The Guardian tells a story of their migration into AWS Aurora Serverless.

This article doesn’t go too deep into technical aspects, but provides a nice overview of the issues one may encounter when trying to move to Aurora.

A couple of things that I found interesting:

- Whatever cloud migration tools are there, pg_dump and pg_restore are your trusted friends.

- This paragraph:


We’re spending roughly $220/month for storage and compute for the database. For the same price we could have rented a db.m7g.xlarge (16GB RAM, 4 vCPUs) Postgres instance along with 100GB of EBS storage or a db.r7g.large (16GB RAM, 2 vCPUs) Aurora instance. I suspect both of these options would have done the job for us, and maybe not have suffered from the same cold start problems as our serverless database, but after 3 migrations, it’s probably time to get back to doing some feature work!


#databases #postgres #aws

If you want to learn SQL, or you know somebody who wants (or should, lol), or you want to refresh your SQL skills, you can use interactive lessons on SQL Bolt.

They're simple, but good enough to get up to speed with the basics.

#databases

​​**Database Fundamentals.**

Because it just fundamentals, it can take a few hours to read and understand + mandatory breaks :)

It's one of the best articles I've seen on general DB topics, with a huge amount of links and notes to go deeper into Rabbit Hole. Definitely recommend it to read.

#databases

Do you run databases in Kubernetes?

Even if you don't, I bet you may run database migrations there. How do you do that?

This article on "The New Stack" makes a case for GitOps approach to the database migrations in Kubernetes.

*tl;dr*: It's Atlas Operator, there's no alternative.

#kubernetes #databases

Resend had a 12 hour outage on the 21st of February.

tl;dr:
> The database migration accidentally deleted data from production servers…
> … we performed a database migration command locally, but it incorrectly pointed to the production environment instead…

You can read it in more details is the article, but here are some of the action items from this postmortem:

- No accessible user role should have write privileges on the production database.
- Improve local development to reduce risks related to database migrations.
- Create redundancy to preserve sending function even during a database outage.
- Increase cadence for disaster recovery tests.
- Implement incident banner on Resend dashboard to inform users quickly.

So, I dunno, check your database. Maybe, you have such a risk as well.

Also, it’s kinda strange that people rarely talk about network isolation not only between their production and non-production environments, but also between their local environment and production. Make production access conscious. Put it on a separate role/VPN. Add some friction accessing it.

Moreover, for the love of god, validate your DB backups.

#postmortem #databases

A brief overview of how to choose the right size for your RDS instance in AWS.

Although, I would argue that certain workloads would already experience problems at 80%+ CPU load on CPU. So, sometimes it doesn't make sense to wait the whole four-week evaluation period.

Also, make sure to keep track of your reserved instances: you don't want to pay more than you should when jumping between instance types!

#aws #databases

You have a Database that can be affected by Disk corruption, and you have millions of transactions? Well, good for you that nothing bad happens yet.

But what if I say that there is better solution, x1000 faster and safer? Just send 0.1BTC called TigerBeettle.

Also, it has of the best presentation what I ever saw. Check it

Testing simulation showed at the end, if you want to try yourself - sim.tigerbeetle.com

#databases

An article and a CNCF NA talk about Atlas - a tool to manage database migrations, and specifically about the Atlas Operator - a way of managing database state in Kubernetes. It's important to point out, that the database itself doesn't have to reside in Kubernetes.

Except some advertisement for Atlas, this article actually points out problems of executing migrations that are not limited to K8s. Still, even though this is an article about a tool from a creator of the tool, I think both blogpost and the tool itself are interesting.

But to be completely fair, there's also the SchemaHero tool - a truly open source one.

#databases #kubernetes

I know that oftentimes folks are critical towards Packt, because many books and courses there are not that good. However, some of them could still provide value.

Thus, it's nice to get them at a discount. Right now, Humble Bundle has two discounts on Packt products:
- Books bundle about databases
- Courses for AWS certification

I might actually get the one on databases, because I want to learn more about Postgresql, but I don't have any specific resource in mind except reading the docs.

Speaking of certifications, we had a voice chat recently on that topic. The voice chat is in Ukrainian.

#books #databases #aws