Homepage on Valerie Parham-Thompson: Database architecture for teams ready to launch and scale

In my previous blog post, I used analyze after defining extended statistics.

Something you probably already know about Postgres: The planner needs to know things about the data to come up with a good access plan.

Retail site selection consultants charge thousands of dollars for trade area reports.

A geofence is a virtual boundary defined around a real-world geographic area.

Most database problems are fixable.

The last couple of posts in this series described navigation algorithms: robot vacuums covering a living room floor, then self-driving taxis doing the same at city scale.

Having a shared vocabulary across database, software, and infrastructure teams is critical when working together to tune latency issues.

Database performance problems are often mysterious.

In my previous post on routing, I used Dijkstra’s algorithm without much discussion of alternatives.

Vacuum robots and self-driving taxi robots navigate physical spaces and avoid obstacles.

A developer asked me recently which open data sources he could use for real-time traffic in his application.

Query optimization is a critical aspect of database performance tuning.

In 2018, I wrote about using SQL functions to generate random test data in MySQL.

In my previous post on pgRouting, I showed how to run shortest-path queries directly inside PostgreSQL.

Finding the nearest X is easy to ask for.

If your application needs to answer “what is the fastest route between two points,” you might reach for an external routing API like Mapbox Directions.

As YugabyteDB continues to evolve, its extensive API ecosystem offers powerful capabilities for database management and automation.

Migrating to YugabyteDB offers significant advantages in terms of high availability, global distribution, and horizontal scalability—features essential for managing modern database workloads.

I have been writing about shortest-path algorithms and A* heuristics in the context of road networks and pgRouting.

I’ve had the chance to share my database expertise in a variety of venues: speaking at meetups and conferences, leading hands-on workshops, mentoring new technologists, and of course writing.

If you’ve ever installed PostGIS and opened the documentation, you’ve run into the type decision right away: geometry or geography?

One thing that can really wreck your performance in Cassandra and the similar YugabyteDB YCQL is large partitions due to an imbalanced key.

Today’s global and distributed applications often need to serve user requests from a single data source across different regions.

Modern distributed databases split large tables into tablets to enable parallel processing and efficient data distribution.

A database transformation and migration project takes solid planning and testing.

I was recently reviewing a database partitioning definition in YugabyteDB (the postgres “ysql” API), and realized the partition distribution might not be what the developer intended.

Postgres and YugabyteDB allow you to define partitions of parent tables.

I had to create a 10 million row table for testing recently, and put together a query to generate random data for it.

Timing of seasonal demand depends on the industry, but a cyclical increase in traffic applies to all industries.

Math… the universal language.

In both MySQL and Postgres, expiring records after a set period of time takes a couple of timestamps and a little creativity.

I was recently setting up a demo to show off query logging features.

I added a new database to my demo platform: Postgres.

A distributed database is designed to withstand outages to a good degree.

I made slight changes to the Debezium UI example for local demo purposes, here: https://github.com/dataindataout/debezium-examples/tree/main/ui-demo Here’s a brief screen recording of how to configure the Debezium postgres connector in the UI using the va…

Quick post to share my presentation last week at the YugabyteDB Friday Tech Talk.

Gearing up for my next YFTT presentation next month.

I recently put together a platform to demo a handful of scenarios related to YugabyteDB cross-cluster replication.

Here’s a very quick way to set up YugabyteDB on your Mac for functional testing.

Fuzzy string matching in YugabyteDB can be done with wildcard lookups, phonetic algorithms (Soundex, Metaphone), and trigram similarity.

Audit logging is essential for tracking the “who, what, when, and where” of database access and changes, supporting both security and compliance requirements.

Memory configuration in YugabyteDB for YSQL workloads involves partitioning among the tserver, master, and postgres processes, each with default ratios.

At DSS 2021, I provided a comprehensive orientation to monitoring YugabyteDB, focusing on how to interpret and leverage built-in metrics for operational visibility.

The founder of YugabyteDB and I discussed Kroger’s multi-year journey modernizing its technology infrastructure using distributed SQL to support its large-scale retail operations with the Kroger VP of Customer Technology at DSS 2021.

Migrating Oracle workloads to Google Cloud’s Bare Metal Solution (BMS) offers benefits like reduced rewrites, familiar hardware, and simplified licensing.

I recently did an upgrade of 200+ nodes of Cassandra across multiple environments sitting behind multiple applications using the cstar tool.

Partial indexes in PostgreSQL dramatically improve query performance for searches on specific email domains.

PostgreSQL offers multiple backup options, including logical backups with pg_dump and pg_dumpall, and physical backups with pg_basebackup.

Upgrading large Cassandra clusters is simplified with cstar, which discovers cluster topology and executes commands in a topology-aware manner.

Integrating Apache Spark with Cassandra requires attention to data modeling, query optimization, and cluster sizing.