brentjanderson

6 ms·

1.
by brentjanderson 3mo ago
I think Ducklake[1] is a terrific example of this. They said "look, let's build a lake house over S3, but for the bit that needs strong consistency (the manifest of which S3 blobs are in play), let's use Postgres". Postg
2.
by brentjanderson 4mo ago
> So many of us have been taught that it is the fate of the small to be destroyed by the big, since they are more ruthless and more powerful. But the evidence doesn't really support this just-so story. This is the comment I came her
3.
by brentjanderson 1y ago
There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you&quot
4.
by brentjanderson 1y ago
Sadly, most of them are lost to time. There's one that I'm aware of at https://archive.org/details/hypercard_voyager-engineer-new is just one station of about 15 from one of the ships. https://thor
5.
by brentjanderson 1y ago
Bill's contribution with HyperCard is of course legendary. Apart from the experience of classrooms and computer labs in elementary schools, it was also the primary software powering a fusion of bridge-simulator-meets-live-action-drama
6.
MCP Server for multi-channel notifications(knock.app)
1 points by brentjanderson 1y ago|0 comments
7.
by brentjanderson 2y ago
IANAL either but if I were you, I’d start here: https://www.vanta.com/products/hipaa or look for competitors. And perhaps look at Stripe Atlas for getting my corporate ducks in a row to start with. https://s
8.
by brentjanderson 2y ago
One of the linked pieces in the Neon blog post is from Knock, where we pulled off a practically zero downtime migration: https://knock.app/blog/zero-downtime-postgres-upgrades In that post we walk through all the steps
9.
Mozilla becoming active in online advertising(blog.mozilla.org)
35 points by brentjanderson 2y ago|55 comments
10.
Living Worlds – 8-bit color cycling demo(effectgames.com)
3 points by brentjanderson 2y ago|1 comments
11.
by brentjanderson 2y ago
https://rpginabox.com/ is fantastic. Includes a lot of great assets, constrained enough to ensure you can actually build something, open enough that you can build a lot of different things with it.
12.
Ink – Inkle's narrative scripting language(inklestudios.com)
2 points by brentjanderson 2y ago|0 comments
13.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP Here - 1. There was zero downtime - no dropped requests, no 5xx errors. There _was_ a latency spike that was carefully tuned to be within timeout limits for our customers, but we dropped zero requests from the cut over. 2. Yes, it's
14.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP here: > Can't initialize a replica from a backup You could, but you're not going to get any of the constant writes happening during the backup. You will have missing writes on the restored system without some kind of replica
15.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP here - we avoid sequences in all but one part of our application due to a dependency. We use [KSUIDs][1] and UUID v4 in various places. This one "gotcha" applies to any sequence, so it's worth calling out as general advice
16.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP here: we looked at this and were not confident in manually advancing the LSN as proposed, and detecting any inconsistency if we missed any replication as a result. Table by table seemed more reliable, despite being more painstaking.
17.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP here. We don’t specify, but it’s big enough that it’s not reasonable to do a dump and restore style upgrade. The strategies in the post should work for any size database. The limit becomes more a matter of individual table sizes, since w
18.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
Neat tool! Some of our findings for large tables could be interesting for a tool like this, making it easier to apply the right strategy to the right tables. Having something like this with those strategies could be indispensable to teams r
19.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP here - we have more coming about the role that the BEAM VM played in this migration too. (The BEAM is the virtual machine for the Erlang ecosystem, analagous to the JVM for Java. Knock runs on Elixir, which is built on Erlang & the B
20.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
That might be possible. We were within days of performing our upgrade when the blue/green feature became available for Postgres, so we didn't consider it for our work. You may be able to boot up an 11.21 replica in an existing Aur
21.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
I looked at getting LSN numbers after an upgrade/cluster replacement, and IIRC restoring from a snapshot emits LSN information into the logs, but it's a bit of of a mixed bag as to whether or not you get the __right__ LSN out the
22.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP Here - that's great feedback! Our hope is to build confidence in both the reliability of our product _and_ the consistency of the workloads. Of course, presenting the illusion of consistency while being flaky is far worse than manag
23.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
That's a very interesting approach, I'm not sure if the sequences would remain consistent under that model or not. AWS RDS Aurora also requires you to drop replication slots when performing version upgrades, so we would unfortunat
24.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
We actually did those steps as part of our overall assessment, and you're right that we could have taken an outage window for that long and called it a day. We decided the tradeoff wasn't worth it for our situation, but taking the
25.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP here: It’s true that all services have downtime for one reason or another. We discussed taking an outage window, but one thing that we kept coming back to was how we might trial run the upgrade with production data. Having a replica on P
26.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
I hear you on that, and can say that Postgres is incredibly capable at going beyond typical relational database workloads. One example are durable queues that are transactionally consistent with the rest of the database play a unique role i
27.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
OP here - we would have used the same approach for the minor upgrades. This isn’t a case of “we procrastinated ourselves into a corner” and more a matter of “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it” recognizing we would need to make the jump eventu
28.
by brentjanderson 3y ago
You’re right! OP here. We were on 11.9 which is not supported by Blue/green deployments for Aurora. Maybe next time.
29.
Zero downtime Postgres upgrades(knock.app)
389 points by brentjanderson 3y ago|115 comments
30.
Knock notifications now supports schedules/cron(knock.app)
2 points by brentjanderson 3y ago|0 comments

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