Software Engineering Daily

Container infrastructure has benefits of security, scalability and efficiency. Containers are a central component of the DevOps movement. Joyent provides simple, secure deployment of containers with bare metal speed on container-native infrastructure Bryan Cantrill is the CTO of Joyent, the father of DTrace and an OS kernel developer for 20 years. Questions: Why are containers relevant to DevOps? Why are containers advantageous to the developer? What is the benefit ofContinue reading...

Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol. IPFS enables the creation of completely distributed applications. Juan Benet is the creator of IPFS and the founder of Protocol Labs. Questions What problem does IPFS solve? Is IPFS most like BitTorrent, or a CDN, or a Git repo? What does this have to do with Databases Week? How does IPFS compare to Ethereum? How does IPFS compare to theContinue reading...

Streaming pipelines and in-memory analytics are difficult to support with old database systems. VoltDB provides streaming analytics with transactions.     Questions How does VoltDB exemplify Michael Stonebraker’s thesis that one size does not fit all? What is the difference between OLTP and Streaming? How does VoltDB serve the common Zookeeper-Kafka-Storm-Cassandra stack? What trends and requirements among OLTP and OLAP systems are changing most rapidly? How does VoltDB’s push-based exportContinue reading...

Ethereum reporting in the podcast media shows a large hype-to-substance ratio. Technical and financial criticisms facing Ethereum are as real as those faced by bitcoin. This episode is a departure from Databases Week.   Stephan Tual is CCO of Ethereum and founder of Ursium, a blockchain consulting company. Thanks to Reddit and Quora for questions. Questions Was Vitalik correct in his allocation of millions of ether to early contributors? WillContinue reading...

InfluxDB is an open-source time-series database. Time-series data can be used by for metrics and analytics. Paul Dix is the CEO of InfluxDB. Questions What differentiates InfluxDB from a regular database with a timestamp on every entry? What is the full-stack architecture of a typical user of InfluxDB? Why are distributed time series databases so hard? What CAP tradeoffs does InfluxDB make? Does Go’s garbage collection make writing a databaseContinue reading...

PipelineDB is a streaming SQL database. Derek Nelson is the CEO of PipelineDB. Questions What are continuous views? Why is PipelineDB a good fit for the Kafka+Storm+HBase-type architecture? How does PipelineDB affect the application tier or the browser tier? What are the latency guarantees for how long it takes raw data streams to be converted into the refined queries provided by a continuous view? What probabilistic data structures does PipelineDBContinue reading...

RethinkDB is an open-source database for the realtime web. RethinkDB pushes changes to the application rather than waiting for a request. Slava Akhmechet is the CEO of RethinkDB. Questions RethinkDB supports a “push” model rather than request handling. Why? What are some use cases for pushing data? What does the full-stack architecture look like when the database has push? What did you learn from the Meteor team? Is RethinkDB like aContinue reading...

MemSQL is a high-performance, in-memory database that combines the horizontal scalability of distributed systems with the familiarity of SQL. Nikita Shamgunov is co-founder and CTO of MemSQL. Questions What types of data does a user want to keep on disk versus on an in-memory database? How does MemSQL compare to MySQL? How do MemSQL users leverage Apache Spark? How does a user onboard with MemSQL? What are the engineering difficultiesContinue reading...

A sidechain is a blockchain you can move bitcoins into and back from, which may have different abilities than the bitcoin blockchain. The lightning network is a caching layer for bitcoin, which allows instant sending and failover to the normal bitcoin network if something goes wrong. Rusty Russell is an Australian free software programmer and advocate, known for his work on the Linux kernel’s networking subsytem and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard. Questions What is aContinue reading...

Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference. Aaron Davis works on MetaMask, which brings Ethereum apps to the web browser. In this monologue episode, Aaron dives deep into the Ethereum internals, philosophy, and developer experience. Questions How does a blockchain represent a Merkle tree? Can a blockchain represent a state transition systemContinue reading...