Bringing real-life learning from on-prem and cloud together
There’s an interesting (and slightly worrying) shift happening right now in the Postgres + Linux world. A recent Linux kernel change (7.x line) is showing significant performance regressions for PostgreSQL workloads — in some cases halving throughput or turning 50ms queries into 500ms ones overnight. (hostingartisan) And here’s the catch:nothing in Postgres changed. What’s Continue Reading
Choosing between MongoDB, Amazon DocumentDB, and Google Cloud Firestore is one of the most common architectural decisions when building modern cloud-native applications. While all three are categorised as “document databases”, they are fundamentally different systems with distinct design philosophies, strengths, and trade-offs. On the surface, they all store semi-structured data Continue Reading
Get SpellTales here: https://spelltales.co.uk/ Introduction In the first post, I talked about how I built SpellTales for iOS using React Native, Expo and an AWS backend. This post covers what happened when I took that working app and tried to put it in the Apple App Store. It is part Continue Reading
Get SpellTales here: https://spelltales.co.uk/ Introduction The SpellTales app started with a very simple idea. After spending most evenings battling with my 9-year-old over her lack of reading and struggles with spelling, I asked her, “What would you actually read?” The reply: “stories about kittens, YouTube and poo”. Ah. Wonderful. So Continue Reading
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL recently introduced delayed read replicas, a long-awaited feature that provides an additional layer of protection against logical errors while still offering the traditional benefits of replication. For database administrators and architects who are focused on building highly available and resilient systems, this addition helps cover scenarios Continue Reading
When working with Amazon Neptune, performance tuning can often feel like navigating a dark cave without a flashlight. Queries might slow down unexpectedly, or your Gremlin traversal that worked on a small dataset suddenly takes forever on a production graph. Fortunately, Neptune gives us a tool to turn on the Continue Reading
Manual AWS Console setups don’t scale. If you’re deploying infrastructure repeatedly, across environments, or as part of a CI/CD pipeline, you want Infrastructure as Code (IaC). That’s where AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) comes in—and using Python makes it accessible to a broad base of developers. In particular, we can Continue Reading
Time to go a bit old school today! I’ve not blogged about Oracle and on-prem to cloud migrations in a long time, but that doesn’t mean they are continuing, at pace, in the background. Today we’ll be looking at how to migrate an Oracle database from on-premises or self-hosted in Continue Reading
Amazon Aurora DSQL (Distributed SQL) introduces a new approach to relational databases, leveraging distributed SQL architecture to deliver high scalability, robust availability, and seamless support for distributed transactions. Adopting Aurora DSQL requires more than excitement (and I am a bit excited; it may come across in this blog) — it calls for Continue Reading
Have you ever experienced that heart-stopping moment when you realize you’ve accidentally deleted important data from your database or messily dropped your production system instead of the dev environment? And to add to the nightmare, you discover that backups weren’t turned on? It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar for Continue Reading
