Category Featured

Application-Level Sharding

There are many ways to scale databases. One I was less familiar with before my last job is application-level sharding. While there are tools that work on some platforms to help you achieve application-level sharding (like Vitess with MySQL), the…

What is Snowflake?

Disclaimer: this article is only my opinions. I do not represent Snowflake. I realized after writing last week’s article that some people might be like me a few months ago, and not really understand what Snowflake is and how it…

My New Direction: Snowflake!

I am so excited about the new job that I’m starting on July 5th! I’m joining the Field CTO office at Snowflake as a Principal Architect, Data Performance. In this role, I’ll be tackling the thorniest performance issues that clients…

Db2 Basics: Table Spaces

Table spaces are one of the more powerful tools in Db2 that are largely invisible. We used to have to spend a lot more time on table space management. Basics and Terminology Some of the terms here are rarely needed…

Unexpected Career Turn

It’s amazing that I’ve had a 22-year career in tech, and until last week, I had never been laid off. Last week, I was a victim of the 20% layoffs at Shopify. Along with me came very talented people with…

MySQL: Quotation Marks

My article on DB2 Basics: Quotation Marks has 962 views so far this year, so I thought it might be time to write a similar article on using quotation marks with MySQL. General quotation marks For the most part, you…

Scaling Relational Databases

“Relational databases don’t scale!”. This is the claim that database experts have heard over and over again, and yet we spend our careers scaling databases. I immediately translate this in my head to either “I threw hardware at the problem…