Observations on JSONB insert elasticity — I was wondering about the JSON document insert performance in PostgreSQL and the extent it varies with document size. Overview PostgreSQL supports JSON as a data type and I was curious how insert performance changes with the size of a JSON document being inserted. To get an impression to the extent…

Some performance numbers when deploying into AlloyDB for PostgreSQL — Recently Google Cloud made AlloyDB for PostgreSQL available for preview. This is a great opportunity to run the queue example from Part 1 in AlloyDB for PostgreSQL to get performance numbers from a brand-new production system. AlloyDB for PostgreSQL configuration I decided to use the largest deployment option available in AlloyDB for PostgreSQL currently…

And some initial performance measurements — Out of curiosity (ha!) I implemented a queue in PostgreSQL with readers (enqueue) and writers (dequeue). I did some basic performance measurement on my laptop with pgbench to get a ballpark idea of how many queue elements can be enqueued and dequeued. Overview: queue A queue is a data structure that writers…

A brief software architecture thought experiment — Regularly I come across the assertion that structural distribution of deployment units or resources is inherently beneficial and can be used as a basic base pattern in the architecture design process. As a consequence a distributed architecture does not need rationalization or justification, or so I am told. I disagree. Thought experiment setup: two infinite networked computers

Recently I came across a specific microservices pattern, and that in turn during research led me to a database theorem. I did not know it, so I decided collecting database theorems in one place. If you know of an additional database related theorem that is missing here, let me know…

Mind the key replication axioms — tl;dr Data consistency is in many cases the key requirement for database migration or replication: if consistency cannot be guaranteed, the (contents of the) target database might be inconsistent compared to the (contents of the) source database. …

tl;dr Cloud Spanner introduced point-in-time-recovery (PITR) as a supported database feature. This blog demonstrates how to recover a dropped table using PITR using gcloud commands. Point-in-time-recovery PITR allows you to recover data at a point in time in the past. …

tl;dr For the longest time I managed gcloud commands in documents or text files, especially during prototyping or initial research. From there I copy and paste them one-by-one or in blocks to a terminal or to the Cloud Shell for execution. This is tedious, error prone and very inefficient —…

By Christoph Bussler and Anand Jain — This blog discusses Cloud Spanner table interleaving from a developer’s perspective: what are interleaving tables, when to use this schema design concept, some edge cases and gotchas. tl;dr: interleaving tables are a query performance optimization tool for specific join query patterns. Interleaving tables are not a data modeling concept even…