Data Engineering

PostGIS Geography vs. Geometry: Choosing the Right Type for Your Spatial Data

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Database Engineering, Data Engineering, Postgres
If you’ve ever installed PostGIS and opened the documentation, you’ve run into the type decision right away: geometry or geography? They look similar, they both store spatial coordinates, and they share many function names. The difference matters more than it first appears. Choosing the wrong one leads to silently incorrect distance calculations.

Count Large Partitions in YCQL

Counting large partitions in the YugabyteDB Cassandra API

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Data Engineering
One thing that can really wreck your performance in Cassandra and the similar YugabyteDB YCQL is large partitions due to an imbalanced key. Without the robust nodetool commands of Cassandra, it can be challenging to find these large partitions in YugabyteDB.

Correct Partition Endpoints

Using the correct endpoints in YugabyteDB database partitioning

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Data Engineering
I was recently reviewing a database partitioning definition in YugabyteDB (the postgres “ysql” API), and realized the partition distribution might not be what the developer intended.

Why You Need a Default Partition

Required default partitions to avoid lost data in Postgres and YugabyteDB

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Data Engineering
Postgres and YugabyteDB allow you to define partitions of parent tables. Partitions are useful in at least two ways:

Generate Random Data

Generating random data for testing in YugabyteDB

Valerie Parham-Thompson
Data Engineering
I had to create a 10 million row table for testing recently, and put together a query to generate random data for it.