Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Star Trek
has inspired huge numbers of people to become scientists, engineers, and programmers. I’m one of them. It often inspired me to work hard, build quality systems, and never give up when looking for the root cause of a tricky bug.
Continue reading “The Engineering Management Myths Star Trek Teaches”
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. 7.6.0 improves access-control options, and also has official ARM and ARM64 builds for the first time.
Continue reading “rqlite 7.6.0 released – now with ARM builds”
I recently started reading Building Secure and Reliable Systems, which was authored by various folks at Google (some of whom I know). Since my work is at the intersection of so much of this — reliable logging systems which must also be secure, it’s an interesting read.
In my experience, the most challenging part about securing our systems are the constant trade-offs one needs to make. Since no system can be made 100% secure, knowing where the marginal risk is no longer worth addressing is quite difficult — I’m hoping this book improves my ability to make these trade-offs correctly.
rqlite is an open-source, lightweight, distributed relational database, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Written in Go, It’s trivial to deploy, and easy to use.
Release 7.5.0 adds Queued Writes. This is the first time rqlite allows users to trade-off durability for much higher write performance.
Continue reading “rqlite 7.5.0: Trading durability for write performance”
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine.
Nienke Eijsvogel, Ruben van Baarle and Daan de Graaf recently ran Jepsen-style testing of rqlite. Their tests showed that rqlite maintains linearizability of record insertion and modification, provided strong read consistency is enabled. Check out the full results on GitHub.
I recently had the opportunity to talk distributed systems and rqlite at the Hacker Nights NYC Meetup. It was great chance to speak with some folks, and discuss rqlite, its design, and how it operates.
The presentation is available, as is a video recording of the talk.
rqlite
is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine and Raft for distributed consensus. Release 7.0 is out now and introduces the first wave of new Node Discovery and Automatic Clustering features.
Continue reading “rqlite 7.0: Designing Node Discovery and Automatic Clustering”
Sit down with any developer today, even those at pretty new software companies, and you’ll see them doing something that programmers have been doing for years — you’ll see them tailing log files.
But why? Why are we still tailing logs?
I’ve mentored, coached, managed, and reviewed many software developers throughout the years. There are many different areas one can discuss, but my most importance advice for engineers early in their career has never changed.
Continue reading “Mentoring junior programmers: What I tell them is job number one”
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine.
There have been a series of releases recently, which make deployment on Linux even easier, and significantly decrease the Docker footprint.
Continue reading “rqlite: static linking and smaller Docker images”
I recently had a chance to speak about rqlite, the distributed, lightweight database built on SQLite, to the Carnegie Mellon Database Group.We discussed the goals of rqlite, its design and use of the Raft consensus protocol, as well as testing strategies and real world applications.
A video of talk has been posted, and presentation itself is also available.
Full details for my upcoming talk on rqlite to the Carnegie Mellon Database Group are now available.
I will discuss rqlite goals, design, and implementation, with particular reference to its use of the Raft consensus algorithm, and its embedding of SQLite. I will also discuss rqlite testing, performance, lessons learned during development, and some of its real-world applications.
rqlite
is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, with SQLite as its storage engine. 6.1.0 enables new SQLite options including JSON1 support and the DBSTAT table. It also supports proper concurrent database reads for in-memory databases, and write requests no longer block those reads.
You can download the release from GitHub.
