Selecting From … Nothing

Every database platform has a way to select from nothing. Sometimes we use it to generate data manually, sometimes we use it to get values of various system functions, but it is important to be able to do. Dummy Table Generally a dummy table is a dummy table that has...

Happy Surprises in Snowflake

As I’ve been learning about Snowflake, at least once a week, I find small things in the SQL or feature set that just make me happy. I really feel like Snowflake is meant for someone who loves SQL, but also someone who does other programming.… Read the...

Application-Level Sharding

There are many ways to scale databases. One I was less familiar with before my last job is application-level sharding. While there are tools that work on some platforms to help you achieve application-level sharding (like Vitess with MySQL), the core work of this...