Interesting Stuff - Week 19, 2020

Throughout the week, I read a lot of blog-posts, articles, and so forth, that has to do with things that interest me:

This blog-post is the “roundup” of the things that have been most interesting to me, for the week just ending.

SQL Server

Announcing mssql-cli is now generally available on macOS and Linux. mssql-cli is an open-source and cross-platform command-line tool to manage SQL Server on-prem and on the cloud. It has some cool features such as Intellisense and syntax highlighting. The blog post linked to here announces, among other things, the availability of mssql-cli on Linux and Mac. I have used it a bit, and it is quite awesome!

High Five with .NET 5. This post looks at the upcoming .NET 5 - the successor to .NET Core - and some of the features it brings.

DDD for microservices. The post linked to here is the first post in a series where the author his experience adopting Domain-Driven Design and integrating it into the software development process. This particular post gives an introduction to DDD. I, for one, am looking forward to the upcoming posts.

Data Lake — Design For Better Architecture, Storage, Security & Data Governance. This post discusses architecture patterns to follow when designing and building data lakes. Keep your eyes open for follow-up posts looking at practical approaches.
Hadoop Distributed File System. I found this post to be an excellent guide helping me understand a bit more about the Hadoop File System, (HDFS). Highly recommended!
Monitoring Data Quality at Scale with Statistical Modeling. If you base business decisions on data, you cannot have bad data. This post looks at how Uber monitors data quality by using statistical modelling. I found the post very interesting!
Apache YARN & Zookeeper. This post dives down into the components that help with resource allocation and high availability in Hadoop: YARN and Zookeeper.

Highly Available, Fault-Tolerant Pull Queries in ksqlDB. This, very informative, blog post looks at how ksqlDB pull queries can be highly available even during server failures.
Using Docker to test your Kafka applications. A very cool post looking at how one can use a Java library, testcontainers-java, to run integration tests for Kafka based applications.
Is Apache Kafka a Database?. This is a thought-provoking article looking at if Kafka can be considered a database. My thoughts around that are - it depends. It depends on what functionality you expect a database to have. So, to me, I’d say Kafka is close, really close, but I would like to see the ability to do range queries against some other field(s) than the ROWKEY field before I consider Kafka a database.

That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoy what I did put together. If you have ideas for what to cover, please comment on this post or ping me.