Distributed Systems

Database Scaling for Seasonal Increases

Understanding seasonal patterns when planning for database scaling

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Timing of seasonal demand depends on the industry, but a cyclical increase in traffic applies to all industries. Maybe your cycle is shorter than a full year. Or maybe it’s related to things like weather patterns or fashion.

Leveraging time to live (TTL)

Using TTL to expire records in YugabyteDB and Cassandra

Valerie Parham-Thompson
In both MySQL and Postgres, expiring records after a set period of time takes a couple of timestamps and a little creativity. With Cassandra, or in this case the YugabyteDB ycql API, TTL (time to live) can be leveraged to handle this functionality, simplifying both the table definition and amount of work required by your code.

Foreign Data Wrappers

Using foreign data wrappers to combine metrics across a distributed database cluster

Valerie Parham-Thompson
I was recently setting up a demo to show off query logging features. Two common extensions, pg_stat_statements and pg_stat_monitor, store data locally. In the case of a distributed database, it is helpful to combine the query runtimes on all nodes.

Provision Ansible Postgres on Mac

Using Ansible to create a local testing environment for Postgres on Mac

Valerie Parham-Thompson
I added a new database to my demo platform: Postgres. This code helps me provision Ansible Postgres on Mac for demo purposes or simple functional testing, and it is an extension of previous work I shared: https://valerieparhamthompson.com/posts/string-search/.

String Search

Link to YFTT fuzzy matching for string searches

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Quick post to share my presentation last week at the YugabyteDB Friday Tech Talk. It was on fuzzy matching, and more generally string searches. Got to nerd out on two of my favorite topics: words (broadly, linguistics and specifically, names) and databases. Check it out!

Fuzzy matching in YugabyteDB

Techniques for matching similar strings in YugabyteDB

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Fuzzy string matching in YugabyteDB can be done with wildcard lookups, phonetic algorithms (Soundex, Metaphone), and trigram similarity. I’ll show a demo of practical examples using artist names, highlighting the performance differences between wildcard searches and phonetic indices. A combination of indexed double metaphone and trigram methods works best for both speed and precision. Also, while YugabyteDB supports PostgreSQL-style extensions, some indexing optimizations behave differently due to its distributed storage layer.

Audit Logging in YugabyteDB | YugabyteDB Friday Tech Talks

Yugabyte's session-level and object-level audit logging improves security and compliance

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Audit logging is essential for tracking the “who, what, when, and where” of database access and changes, supporting both security and compliance requirements. It helps organizations know who accessed or modified data, schemas, roles, or grants.