Relaxing on CouchDB

Apache CouchDB 2.0 was recently released and has some compelling features for those looking for clustered document oriented databases. In today’s post I want to share a few of things that I’ve learned on how to use CouchDB’s new features and how to avoid some new user mistakes that we made along the way. ...

December 15, 2016 · Michael Hughes

Of null VARCHAR fields and empty strings

How to represent a blank user input is a reasonably innocent design question. On a couple occasions though I have been bitten by systems that have been designed without considering that question seriously. Maybe it’s a clear choice to some, but today’s post makes an argument that in representing an empty input as a null is better than using a empty or blank string. ...

December 1, 2014 · MichaelHughes

On the use of AWS DynamoDB

In today’s post I’ll cover some of the potential use cases for AWS DynamoDB, why you might want to use it or not. ...

June 7, 2014 · Michael Hughes

jOOQ Framework - A Java SQL DSL

After reviewing higher level JPA 2.0 ab­strac­tions like Ec­pliseLink and TopLink for tieing a service ap­pli­ca­tion to a database I chose to use jOOQ because of its flex­i­bil­i­ty and ability to provide tight control over the SQL being executed in the ap­pli­ca­tion’s data layer. ...

April 4, 2014 · MichaelHughes

Slicing vs. aggregating big data

So you have a lot of data from something. What’s happens next? Where does the data go after point of capture? The data in question could be analytics gathered from application performance, click logs from a website, search data from a search engine, traffic flow data from a state agency’the point being that there is a lot of it. The given examples share use cases with some of the things covered by the much abused phrase “big data”, this post will touch on that concept lightly. The main point of today’s post though is to briefly cover one approach to thinking about how to store a bunch of data whatever it happens to be. ...

March 30, 2014 · MichaelHughes