Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
Software engineering, distributed systems, databases, and the teams that build them
rqlite is a lightweight, user-friendly, distributed relational database. It’s written in Go, employs Raft for distributed consensus, and uses SQLite as its storage engine. The newly released rqlite 9.2 introduces a major improvement to startup performance – nodes can now resume from where they…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, and built on SQLite and Raft. With its origins dating back to 2014, its design has always prioritized reliability, and quality. The robustness of rqlite is also a testament…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database. It’s written in Go, built on the Raft consensus algorithm, and uses SQLite as its storage engine. With release 8.32, rqlite now supports fast, reliable, Linearizable reads—delivering strong consistency guarantees without the…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Concurrency and synchronization are at the heart of any database — and distributed systems too. Today, I’d like to share the set…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go. It is built on the Raft consensus protocol and uses SQLite as its storage engine. Development of 9.0 has begun and aims to reduce disk usage by approximately 50%.…
My GopherCon 2023 talk, Build Your Own Distributed System Using Go, has been published to YouTube. It was a great conference, and I appreciated the opportunity to share some lessons on designing, developing, and operating modern distributed systems in general,…
rqlite is a lightweight, easy-to-use, open-source, distributed relational database. It’s written in Go and uses SQLite as its storage engine. Release 8.0 is out now and brings substantial advancements to its handling of large data sets. It also adds many…
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. I’ve been developing rqlite since 2014 and its design and implementation has evolved substantially during that time — and the design docs…
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…
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 …
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. v6.0.0 is out now and makes clustering more robust. It also lays the foundation for more important features.
There is a popular image out there, among the general public, that small startups — particularly small software startups — are a hotbed of technical innovation, constantly creating new technology. But is it true?
If you work in the logging, monitoring — or even Observability — space long enough, you eventually end up on team that tries to build a system that handles both logs and time series in a high-performant and cost-efficient manner.…
This is a post following up on my Monitorama Baltimore 2019 talk. Logging and Monitoring systems — Observability Systems, if you prefer — often seem to struggle to meet the needs of their users.
Monitoring — the measurement of your system, the gathering of telemetry, and alerting when it behaves anomalously — is key to running large-scale, modern computer systems. But what many developers today don’t realise is that monitoring can be a key part of…
I’ve been programming for many years, and have spent most of the last few years managing development teams. I’ve written plenty of closed source software, and for a time made my living writing open source software too. One thing stands…
Slack: Where work happens Something is happening at companies that use Slack. Slack, the company, may claim it’s work, but it’s less and less productive work, and it’s having a destructive affect upon my own field of software development. I…
Some fellow developers, using Go for the first time, recently asked me how to organise a Go project and for some high-level guidance on programming using the language. I thought the most effective way to answer this question was to…
Programming a database is fascinating work. I’ve been deeply involved with developing open source databases for the past two years and programming a database is possibly the most instructive project one can ever complete as a software developer. What’s really…
“Bad money drives out good.” When is the last time you spoke with your fellow developer? I mean actually spoke? Or was it just over Slack? I like really Slack, Flowdock, Hipchat and the like. I couldn’t do my job…
This is the last part of a 3-part series “Designing and building a search system for log data”. Be sure to check out part 1 and part 2. In the last post we examined the design and implementation of Ekanite,…
This is the second part of a 3-part series “Designing and building a search system for log data”. Be sure to check out part 1. Part 3 follows this post. In the previous post I outlined some of the high-level…
This is the first part of a 3-part series “Designing and building a search system for log data”. Part 2 is here, and part 3 is here. For the past few years, I’ve been building indexing and search systems, for…
“Run into an obstacle in what you’re working on? Hmm, I wonder what’s new online. Better check.” If you haven’t already, you should start reading Paul Graham’s essays. In one on philosophy, Graham believes that many of the answers provided…
I recently came across a talk on YouTube titled History of Software Engineering, given by Paolo Perrotta. Normally I find online videos to have a low information-to-time ratio, but this one was excellent. It’s not too long, with plenty of…