Oct 25What the Heck is SDF?Introduction 2023 has been quite a year for innovation, adoption, and competition. We saw HashiCorp generate significant outrage when they changed the licenses of their products to be less open sourceish. This quickly gave rise to forks of Terraform, such as OpenTofu. We’re seeing a rise in competition with established…Dbt4 min readDbt4 min read
Oct 18What the Heck is LanceDB?Introduction I started seeing LanceDB early in 2023, and my first thought was that it might be an attractive fit in the Apache Iceberg ecosystem or as a general replacement for the Parquet columnar file format. I was thinking too small, though. It is an in-process multi-model serverless vector database written…Vector Database4 min readVector Database4 min read
Oct 16What the Heck is Apache SeaTunnel?Introduction I started seeing chatter about Apache SeaTunnel in early 2023 and was low-key keeping an eye on it. The project was started in 2017 as Waterdrop and grew out of the contributions from the creator of Apache Dolphin, which supports SeaTunnel as a task plugin. I had some initial issues…Apache Spark4 min readApache Spark4 min read
Oct 9by Dr. Randy Gilchrist, LDS Psychologistby Dr. Randy Gilchrist, LDS Psychologist www.LDSdimension.com FREE Online Dating A key to successful dating and relationships is self-awareness. It is important to realize how we are acting and the impact and effect it has on those around us. Without self-awareness, how can you know what needs to change…Dating3 min readDating3 min read
Oct 9Gerrymander Tony BeallIntroduction The California Voting Rights Act was passed in 2001 and has led to most cities switching from “at large” to “by district” voting. What that means is instead of voting for the entire city council, you live in a district, much like your voting districts for state and federal representation…Politics6 min readPolitics6 min read
Oct 2Branches & Tags: Comparing Iceberg, Hudi, and Delta Lake TablesIntroduction This blog assumes you know the data lake table formats; otherwise, it might not make much sense. Branching and tagging are an important feature of Apache Iceberg, released in February 2023 as part of version 1.2.0. They unlock a new world of use cases and are an exciting evolution to…Apache Hudi8 min readApache Hudi8 min read
Sep 20What the heck is GlareDB?Introduction It has been a while since my last “What the heck is??” article, and I’ve recently seen some rapid growth from GlareDB and wanted to learn more. What really piqued my interest was the recent announcements of support for Apache Iceberg and a new hybrid execution model. So, what the…Python4 min readPython4 min read
Sep 9DevRel: To be, or not to be, a personality?Developer Relations/Advocacy, or “DevRel” is a relatively recent formalization of an activity that has been going on for decades now. When I had my own Linux software company from about 1999 to 2010 that was heavy on KDE, I would engage in this all the time. It was harder back…Developer Relations4 min readDeveloper Relations4 min read
Oct 25, 2022Kate Sanchez and The Bealls: Why do they care so much?Something strange is afoot in California Republican circles. As usual, disgraced Rancho Santa Margarita city councilman Tony Beall and his wife (Assemblywoman Laurie Davies chief of staff) Jennifer Beall are in the middle of it all. We know that both Tony and Jennifer have been found guilty of campaign finance…Politics3 min readPolitics3 min read
Oct 13, 2022What The Heck Is PRQL?Introduction When I did my first “What The Heck Is…?” on DuckDB a few months ago, I expected that to be a one-off, but then I ran across Malloy and did another one. Now I’ve run across PRQL (pronounced Prequel) which stands for “Pipelined Relational Query Language”, and I’m wondering…Sql4 min readSql4 min read
