databases

War Story: Ditching MongoDB 6 for PostgreSQL 17 Saved Our 50M User App from Data Inconsistencies Our social commerce platform hit 50 million monthly active users in Q3 2024, powering 1.2 million daily transactions across 30 countries. For three years, we’d run on MongoDB 6, lured by its flexible document model and horizontal scaling. But by mid-2024, data inconsistencies were threatening our core…

This article was written by Darshan Jayarama . I was recently packing for a short trip, and I personally hate carrying 2–3 pieces of luggage. One for my laptop, another for clothes. So a person like me has definitely used a “vacuum sealer,” allowing me to pack as many clothes as I want. During the trip, I had an idea. Which vacuum sealers do we have to help store efficiently and reduce billing? H…

So you've outgrown MySQL. Maybe you need better JSON support, real window functions, or you're moving to a managed cloud database that defaults to Postgres. Whatever the reason — MySQL to PostgreSQL migration trips up almost everyone the first time. The two dialects look similar but behave very differently under the hood. This guide walks through the actual syntax differences, real failure points…

I Couldn’t Write a SQL Query Today… So I Started Learning SQL from Scratch (Day 1) A beginner’s journey into SQL, databases, and understanding how data powers real-world applications. 💻 The Moment That Changed Everything Today, I got stuck on something that should have been simple. I had to write a SQL query to fetch specific data… And I couldn’t. I tried multiple times: Different queries Differe…

We had a wide MySQL table — 8 million rows, 8 GB on disk, mostly index — about to grow 10× from a historical backfill. The instinct was to normalise: pull repeated strings into dimension tables. Classic relational hygiene. But twenty minutes spent measuring cardinality and average length per column pointed somewhere different. The biggest single column by raw bytes was a high-cardinality, near-un…

MongoDB is a document database that stores data as flexible JSON-like documents instead of fixed rows and columns. It is commonly used for web applications, REST APIs, content management systems, and real-time analytics where the data model changes frequently. This tutorial walks through installing MongoDB Community Edition on Ubuntu 24.04, enabling authentication, creating an admin user, creatin…

Dapper vs. Entity Framework When building data-driven applications in .NET, two of the most popular data access technologies are Dapper and Entity Framework Core (EF Core) . While both serve the same fundamental purpose—interacting with databases—they take very different approaches. Choosing between them depends heavily on your performance needs, development style, and project complexity. Let’s b…

Let me rewind to a Tuesday afternoon I’d rather forget. We had a Rails monolith that had grown fat and happy over five years. The dashboard—a beautiful, chart-filled monster—was running a 12-second query every time the CEO clicked “refresh.” Twelve seconds of GROUP BY , COUNT(DISTINCT) , and LEFT JOIN hell across a million-row events table. The CEO didn’t yell. He just stared at the spinning curs…

I still remember the exact moment I realized soft deletes weren't just a feature—they were a confession. We were seven months into a CRM project. The product manager came to my desk with a panicked look. "A user accidentally deleted 3,000 contact records. Can we get them back?" My stomach turned. I had designed the database with hard deletes—clean, efficient, and unforgiving. DELETE FROM contacts…

SQL is widely known for data querying and manipulation but systems do grow; data becomes larger; processes become repetitive and operations become sensitive. SQL has some features which enables it to be considered a fully fledged programming language. Some of the features which I discuss in this article are procedures, functions and transactions. Each of these concepts serve distinct purposes. Pr…

Power BI is a powerful business analytics service developed by Microsoft that empowers users to visualise data and share interactive dashboards across their organisation. While Power BI can handle data from various sources, its true potential is unleashed when connected to robust data sources like SQL databases. SQL databases—such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server —are the industry standard fo…

If you’ve been around data engineering long enough, you’ve probably heard these terms thrown around in meetings: “Just dump it in the data lake” “We’ll expose it through the warehouse” “That goes into the mart” “We’re moving to a lakehouse architecture” And honestly… it can sound like four different ways of saying the same thing. They’re not. Each one solves a slightly different problem in the da…

If you are stepping into the world of data engineering or analytics, you have likely been hit with a wave of storage buzzwords like data lake and data warehouse . In this article, we will demystify these terms so you can understand exactly where your data belongs. Database Imagine you just launched a business. You need a system to record daily operations every time a customer buys a product, upda…

In a previous post , I explored Codd's connection trap in PostgreSQL and MongoDB — the classic pitfall where joining two independent many-to-many relationships through a shared attribute produces spurious combinations that look like facts but aren't. The example followed Codd's 1970 suppliers–parts–projects model: we know which suppliers supply which parts, and which projects use which parts, but…

Automating Hermitage to see how transactions differ in MySQL and MariaDB Transaction isolation levels (e.g. Read Uncommitted, Read Committed, Repeatable Read, Serializable) in the official SQL standard are defined in terms of transaction anomalies like Read Skew, Lost Updates, etc. But the SQL standard itself is ambiguous (yes, even the latest 2023 version) and allows some silly behavior. Let's m…

If you are involved in software development, data analysis, or IT, you have likely heard the acronyms OLTP and OLAP. They sound similar, but they serve two completely different purposes in the world of data management. Mixing them up is a common mistake that can lead to slow applications, failed analytics projects, and frustrated users. In this post, we will break down what OLTP and OLAP are, vis…

Why I Built DBX I've used many database clients — DataGrip requires a subscription, DBeaver is slow to start, TablePlus locks features behind a paywall, and most Electron-based tools ship 200+ MB installers. I wanted something open-source, fast, and lightweight that just works. So I built DBX with Tauri (Rust + Vue) — the installer is only ~15 MB because it uses the system's native webview instea…

Today I'm releasing Minigraf 1.0 — a single-file embedded graph database written in Rust, with Datalog as its query language and bi-temporal semantics built in. If you've ever wanted Datomic but embedded, or SQLite but for connected data with full history, this is that. One .graph file, no server, no clustering, no Java runtime. It runs natively, in WebAssembly, on Android, on iOS, and inside age…

🔥Connect: https://xam-heisenberg-company.vercel.app/ 🔥GitHub: https://github.com/Subham-Maity 🔥Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSubhamMaity 🔥LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/subham-xam 🔥Insta: https://www.instagram.com/subham_xam MeiliSearch - The Complete Production Setup Guide (2026) How I Ended Up Down the Search Engine Rabbit Hole Okay so here's the thing. I was building a personal financ…

Most dev tools hide behind "Contact Sales" buttons. I’m doing the opposite. With the Conversion Catalyst update, I’ve made BugiaData the most transparent way to handle relational test data. As a solo builder, I wanted to focus on the human element of dev-ops: Instant ROI: I built a calculator to help you justify the shift from manual scripts to synthetic data. Relational Templates: I added a feat…