Newsletter sent on 23th September 2019

Good Monday morning – if your timezone is similar to London, Europe.

Events

The next London Open Source Databases meetup is: Open Source Communities: vendors and users working together, 28th September. The speakers are Colin Charles, Businessperson, open source consultant, technical architect, experienced community builder; and Stacy Rostova (Raspopina), Communications Manager @ ProxySQL.

The subject is a bit unusual for our meetup. I wrote an article to explain why I believe it is essential to start talking about open source and communities: London Meetup – Open Source Communities: vendors and users working together.

Stacy also wrote an article which is worth a read – about what her experience taught her about communities: Community as No System. 7 Lessons Learnt from Years in Communications.

Other events:

• Percona Live Europe 2019 – 30th September – 2th October, Amsterdam
• Digital Transformation Expo Europe – 9th-10th October, London
• DevRelCon 2019 – 10th-11th December, London

Articles from the web

Technical

• Waltz: A Distributed Write-Ahead Log for streaming oriented processing.
• Is Galera trx_commit=2 and sync_binlog=0 evil? – If you use Galera and seek compromise between performance and reliability, you should read this article by Art van Scheppingen.
• Joins are slow, is that correct? – Greg Kemnitz wrote a nice answer to this Quora question.
• Memcached adds support for saving cache to disk and restoring it on restart.
• Postgres Execution Plans — Field Glossary – Understanding PostgreSQL query plans.
• PostgreSQL, JSON and Hibernate – A good tutorial. From the conclusion: “As great as it is to have this kind of flexibility along with SQL database, don’t abuse it. There are use cases for using this field, but just because its cool and gives you flexibility doesn’t mean you want to use it.”.

IT and Database strategy

• Using MySQL as a Cache Layer for BigQuery – An unexpected MySQL use case from the real world.
• Comparing Distributed SQL Performance – Yugabyte DB vs. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL vs. CockroachDB – This comparison is made by YugaByte, but still interesting.
• When Waterfall Principles Sneak Back Into Agile Workflows – Unfinished story of an attempt to go Agile.
• 7 tips for sysadmins to improve communication skills – Sysadmins and DBAs should pay more attention to the way they communicate. I think that this article only scratches the surface of the problem, and I’ll write about this topic in the future.

Business

• Britain’s Next Prime Minister Has Probably Already Lost Scotland – This article is not the most recent – it’s from June – however it explains very clearly Scotland’s position on Brexit.

Lifestyle, workplace

• The rise of working from home – These considerations about working from home are focused on UK businesses, but they are useful for everyone.
• How to Motivate Yourself When You Don’t Have a Deadline – Very simple strategies to avoid that a project languishes for months.
• Should You Accept a Lower-Level Job After a Career Break? – Re-entering after a long leave can be difficult.

About me

If you like my contents, my public talks, my books and this newsletter, you may want to check my professional services. If you can’t make this kind of decisions, please consider to endorse me with your manager.

Thank you!

Toodle pip,
Federico Razzoli