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. This blog discusses data migration and replication conceptually from the viewpoint of data…

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…

Selecting Databases for Multi-cloud Use Cases — Note: this blog has the same content as the series with the same name. With medium.com series being deprecated, I post the same content unchanged as regular blog here. This series discusses various aspects of multi-cloud database management: What is multi-cloud database management? What are use cases for managing databases…