Interesting Data-Related Blogs and Articles – Week of July 28, 2019

Contains recommendations for monitoring, configuration parameters, and locking behavior on both the source and the replica instances.

An interesting neutral party overview of PostgreSQL on the Aurora implementation. Covers best practices, compatibility with “vanilla” PostgreSQL, monitoring and a host of other topics.

Describes the architecture and overview of a solution that relies on a combination of Step Functions, Lambda, and Batch for building an ETL workflow. There’s a link in the article to a CloudFormation template that will launch the needed infrastructure.

Excellent discussion on when to create composite indexes as opposed to indexes on single columns.

You might be surprised which method is faster (at least in this set of tests).

PostgreSQL has supported various parallel strategies since version 9.6 and an even broader set of parallel operations came with version 10. This article provides and overview of types of queries that can execute in-parallel.

It’s truly a random list, but a number of these look interesting and helpful.

Midyear release of the popular Python environment.

Last week I linked to the release notes for the latest version of PyCharm (2019.2), the popular Python IDE. This article shows how to use the Jupyter notebook integration in that release.

“Isolation levels” is probably a more well-known concept, but as this article explains there are consistency levels (the C in ACID) for database systems as well. I recommend reading anything by Daniel Abadi.

Presto is a query engine for executing SQL on different data sources. The article above discusses challenges that Pinterest has encountered in using Presto for various uses and how it overcame those.

Is no game safe from the AI juggernaut?

A new open-access journal sponsored by the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

That didn’t take long. The acquisition was originally announced on June 10.

Technically, last week in Neo4j. A helpful summary of noteworthy posts from the Neo4j blog.

This week’s episode from the podcast Linear Digressions.

This week’s episode from the Data Engineering Podcast.

There’s one in Las Vegas (North America) in September and one in Berlin (Europe) in October.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative 2019 Annual Conference. Held this year in Seoul, South Korea.

Everyone who designs relational databases ought to be familiar with the concepts in this article. There are higher normal forms (Boyce-Codd normal form anyone?) that have been proposed since Kent’s paper, but these five are the foundation.

Created and maintained by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the CDWA is a set of guidelines for describing art, architecture, and other works of culture. One implementation of the CDWA is the Cultural Objects Name Authority.