Author: Valerie Parham-Thompson

When I first heard of Postgres partial indexes, I knew immediately that this would have solved a problem I had in MySQL about a decade ago. That problem didn’t go unsolved, but it certainly wasn’t as easy as I’ll demonstrate…

There were some security patches released this month for Postgres, to put further restrictions on pathways that malicious users could use to leverage the search_path to insert malicious code. What is the search path? What is search_path? Postgres has a…

Covering indexes in Postgres came up in our weekly tech call because of a query optimization review one of the teams has in progress. It seemed like some covering indexes weren’t working. I’ve been reading a book called Curious Moon,…

There are at least four ways to back up a Postgres database: SQL dump, filesystem snapshots, continuous archiving, and third-party tools. For each, notes on the recovery point objective (or RPO, which is a measure of how up-to-date your application…

I recently did an upgrade of 200+ nodes of Cassandra across multiple environments sitting behind multiple applications using the cstar tool. We chose the cstar tool because, out of all automation options, it has topology awareness specifically to Cassandra. Here…

Spark Overview Spark was created in 2009 as a response to difficulties with map-reduce in Hadoop, particularly in supporting machine learning and other interactive data analysis. Spark simplifies the processing and analysis of data, reducing the number of steps and…

This weekend, I gave an orientation to Docker for a developer friend of mine who works in an enterprise environment and was preparing to take on new development projects using Docker. I have given several Docker 101 workshops, but it’s…

Overview of Cassandra As previously mentioned in my notes on lightweight transactions, Cassandra does not support ACID transactions. Cassandra was built to support a brisk ingest of writes while being distributed for availability. Follow the link to my previous post…

Cassandra nodetool provides several types of commands to manage your Cassandra cluster. See my previous posts for an orientation to Cassandra nodetool and using nodetool to get Cassandra information. My colleague has provided an in-depth analysis of backup strategies in…

Cassandra nodetool provides several types of commands to manage your Cassandra cluster. See my previous post about Cassandra nodetool for an orientation to the types of things you can do with this helpful Cassandra administration tool. Here, I am sharing details…