Plurrrr

The SQL language made its first appearance in 1974, as part of IBM’s System R database. It is now over 50 years later, and SQL is the de facto language for operating the majority of industrial grade databases. Its usage has bifurcated into two domains – application programming and data analysis. The majority of my 12 year career (data engineer and data scientist) has been concerned with the latter, and SQL is by far the language that I have used the most. I love SQL for the productivity it has afforded me, but over time I’ve also become aware of its many flaws and idiosyncrasies.

If you scour Hacker News & Reddit for advice about databases, some common words of caution are that SQLite doesn't scale or that it is a single-user database and it's not appropriate for your web-scale application.

Like any folklore, it has some historical truth. But it's also so wildly out-of-date.

Has your JavaScript ever failed to execute correctly and you struggled to figure out why? Has your CSS ever behaved strangely and you struggled to figure out why or get it to display as intended? Debugging is a fundamental component of programming and an essential skill for all software developers.

Recently at work I was tasked with simulating the workload of a client’s infrastructure consisting of several virtual machines. For our use case, this turned out to be a largely solved problem, thanks to existing tools like fio.

For those who don’t know it, fio is a simple yet powerful program that allows simulating various kinds of I/O workloads. Its simplicity stems from two basic facts: (1) it’s a standalone, CLI executable and (2) it uses plain INI files to define workloads. It’s also powerful because of its extensibility: thanks to I/O engines, it’s not limited to just I/O simulation.