A new programmer learns to build applications using data structures like a queue, a cache, or a database. Modern cloud applications are built using more sophisticated tools like Redis, Kafka, or Amazon S3. These tools do multiple things well, and often have overlapping functionality. Application architecture becomes less straightforward. The applications we are building today

Expectations for mobile apps have gone up steadily since the iPhone was released. But the choice of databases built for mobile apps has remained limited mostly to SQLite. RealmDB was created as a new option for mobile developers on iOS, Android, or any other mobile platform.   Realm is not just a database. It is

Column-oriented data storage allows us to access all of the entries in a database column quickly and efficiently. Columnar storage formats are mostly relevant today for performing large analytics jobs. For example, if you are a bank, and you want to get the sum of all of the financial transactions that took place on your

In the last five years, companies started hiring data engineers. A data engineer creates the systems that manage and access the huge volumes of data that are accumulating on cheap cloud servers. As the saying goes, “it’s more expensive to throw out the data than to store it.” Pete Soderling joins the show to discuss

Eight years ago, MongoDB was an internal project at 10gen, a company that was trying to build a platform-as-a-service out of open-source components. The team at 10gen realized that the platform-as-a-service play would be too complex, and difficult to build. Since MongoDB was the most valuable component of that project, they narrowed their focus to

When Uber’s engineering team published a blog post about moving to MySQL from Postgres, Markus Winand started receiving lots of email. Markus writes about databases on his blog “Use The Index, Luke,” a guide to database performance for developers. The people emailing Markus wanted to know–if Postgres doesn’t work well for Uber, is it safe

When a company switches the relational database it uses, you wouldn’t expect the news of the switch to go viral. Most engineers are not interested in the subtle differences between MySQL and Postgres, right?   Uber recently switched from having Postgres as its main relational database to using MySQL. Evan Klitzke wrote a detailed blog

Relational databases are used by most applications. MySQL, Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, and other products implement the core features of a relational database in different ways. A developer who has never studied this space in detail may not know the differences between these databases, and in this episode we describe some tradeoffs that relational databases

Breakthroughs in modern data research tend to come from companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, with projects like MapReduce, Cassandra, and Dynamo.   Twenty years ago, this types of breakthroughs would be happening in academia, which causes today’s guest Peter Bailis to ask: is the academic data community having an identity crisis?   Peter is

In a typical data analytics system, there are a variety of technologies interacting. HDFS for storing files, Spark for distributed machine learning, pandas for data analysis in Python–each of these different technologies has a different format for how data is represented.   Serialization and deserialization between these different formats causes significant latency across the overall