The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

By Hussein NasserTechnology

The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser episodes

November 05, 2021 What is the cost of Indexing too many columns - Udemy Q&A November 2021
Head to https://database.husseinnasser.com to get a discount coupon for my introduction to database engineering.
In this video, I answer some of your questions on the Introduction to Database Engineering Course.
28 min
October 30, 2021 when indexes are useless | The Backend Engineering Show
head to https://database.husseinnasser.com to get a discount coupon for my Introduction to Database Engineering course
In this episode of the backend engineering show, I’ll discuss three instances where indexes can be useless and might add overhead to your operations. Let us discuss.
0:00 Intro
1:34 What is an Index?
4:00 The Cost of Indexes
6:40 Most values are the similar
13:00 WHERE UPPER(NAME)=‘RICK’
17:10 Composite Index
23:00 How do I know if I’m using an Index
28 min
October 21, 2021 The cost rolling back transactions (postgres/mysql)
The cost of a long-running update transaction that eventually failed in Postgres (or any other database for that matter.
In Postgres, any DML transaction touching a row creates a new version of that row. if the row is referenced in indexes, those need to be updated with the new tuple id as well. There are exceptions with optimization such as heap only tuples (HOT) where the index doesn’t need to be updated but that doesn’t always happens.
If the transaction rolls back, then the new row versions created by this transaction (millions in my case) are now invalid and should NOT be read by any new transaction. You have two solutions to address this, do you clean all dead rows eagerly on transaction rollback? Or do you do it lazily as a post process?
Postgres does the lazy approach, a command called vacuum which is called periodically Postgres attempts to remove those dead rows and free up space in the page.
Whats the harm of leaving those dead rows in? Its not really correctness issues at all, in fact transactions know not to read those dead rows by checking the state of the transaction that created them. This is however expensive, the check to see of the transaction that created this row is committed or rolled-back. Also the fact that those dead rows live in disk pages with alive rows makes an IO not efficient as the database has to filter out dead rows. For example, a page may have contained 1000 rows, but only 1 live row and 999 dead rows, the database will make that IO but only will get a single row of it. Repeat that and you end up making more IOs. More IOs = slower performance.
Other databases do the eager approach and won’t let you even start the database before rolling back is successfully complete, using undo logs. Which one is right and which one is wrong? Here is the fun part! Nothing is wrong or right, its all decisions that we engineers make. Its all fundamentals. Its up to you to understand and pick. Anything can work. You can make anything work if you know what you are dealing with.
If you want to learn about the fundamentals of databases and demystify it check out my udemy course
https://database.husseinnasser.com
10 min
October 13, 2021 TLS and HTTPS Options in Microsoft IIS
In this episode of the backend engineering show, I’ll discuss all HTTPS/TLS binding options in Microsoft IIS and also explain why every web server and reverse proxy should have some of these fine level control.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 Require Server Name Indication (SNI)
5:00 Disable TLS 1.3 Over TCP
8:30 Disable Legacy TLS
10:00 Disable OCSP Stapling
12:00 Disable QUIC
14:30 Disable HTTP/2
17:30 Certificate
Get my database course https://database.husseinnasser.com
Get my NGINX course https://nginx.husseinnasser.com
Get my Python on the Backend course https://python.husseinnasser.com
21 min
October 10, 2021 On Graph Databases | The Backend Engineering Show
I get a lot of emails asking me to talk about graph databases, so I want to start researching them, but I wanted to give you guys the framework of how I think about any databases to defuse any “magic” that might be there.
In this video, I discuss what constrains a database and how the use cases try to work around them.
0:00 Intro
1:50 What constrains a database?
4:00 Indexing Techniques
5:30 Storage Engines - Row-Store
9:00 Columnar Databases
12:00 Graph use cases
16:00 Graph Storage Engines
Learn the fundamentals of databases, grab my my Introduction to Database Engineering udemy course here for a discount coupon https://database.husseinnasser.com 🧑‍🏫
23 min
October 08, 2021 Certificates gone bad | The Backend Engineering Show
Certificates contain useful metadata including the public key, domain name, signature, etc. However, the private key can be leaked which causes the certificate to be invalid/dangerous to keep around. In that particular situation, we need a mechanism to revoke certificates and that is what I’m going to discuss in this show.

0:00 Intro
0:30 Why Certificates
12:00 Certificates can go bad
14:50 Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs)
18:30 OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol)
20:40 OCSP Stapling
24:30 Best certificates are short
26:30 Summary
Become a Member on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg/join
🔥 Members Only Content
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUMO_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg
Support my work on PayPal
https://bit.ly/33ENps4
29 min
October 06, 2021 Detailed analysis on the facebook outage
In this episode, I go through the Facebook detailed article regarding their October 4th, 2021 outage and discuss it in length. enjoy

Facebook blog: https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/05/networking-traffic/outage-details/

0:00 Introduction on Facebook Networking Architecture
12:00 The Cause of the Outage
17:00 What’s DNS
23:00 DNS Servers disabled BGP ads
27:00 Could the outage have been prevented?
32:00 Why did it take so long?
38:00 Why you can’t just flip everything on
41:30 Summary

🧑‍🏫 Courses I Teach
https://database.husseinnasser.com
https://nginx.husseinnasser.com
https://python.husseinnasser.com

Become a Member on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg/join
🔥 Members Only Content
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUMO_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg
Support my work on PayPal
https://bit.ly/33ENps4

🏭 Backend Engineering Videos in Order
https://backend.husseinnasser.com
💾 Database Engineering Videos
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQnljOFTspQXjD0HOzN7P2tgzu7scWpl2
44 min
October 04, 2021 Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram is Down here’s what might’ve caused it (early report)
Quick summary of the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage on Oct 4th 2021
9 min
September 27, 2021 How Airline WIFI allows Texting but not Media in WhatsApp/iMessage
In this episode I discuss my recent flight through Alaskan airlines and how they block certain services but allow only texting.
11 min
September 13, 2021 Spook.js - This will bloat Chrome even more | The Backend Engineering Show
Spook.js is a new transient execution side channel attack which targets the Chrome web browser. We show that despite Google's attempts to mitigate Spectre by deploying Strict Site Isolation, information extraction via malicious JavaScript code is still possible in some cases.
Resources
https://www.spookjs.com/
https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/site-isolation
Paper: https://www.spookjs.com/files/spook-js.pdf
Chapters
0:00 Process Isolation in Chrome
8:00 Spook.js subdomain Attack
12:00 Spook.js Extension Attack
13:00 Summary
Become a Member on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg/join
🔥 Members Only Content
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUMO_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg
Support my work on PayPal
https://bit.ly/33ENps4
🧑‍🏫 Courses I Teach
https://husseinnasser.com/courses
19 min

About The Backend Engineering Show with Hussein Nasser

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to the Backend Engineering Show podcast with your host Hussein Nasser. If you like software engineering you’ve come to the right place. I discuss all sorts of software engineering technologies and news with specific focus on the backend. All opinions are my own.