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Editorial
 There's No Free Lunch with Open-source Software As a member of the PostgreSQL open-source community, I have been following the recent license change by Redis Labes on March 20, 2024. Redis introduced a dual license model, specifically adding the Redis Source Available License (RSAL), which prevents other vendors from providing Redis as a service without a paid subscription from Redis Labs. The secondary open-source license still allows the source code to be used and modified for non-commercial. While that sounds promising, it mostly just causes further confusion. This license change has sparked a lot of controversy and criticism from the open-source community. Many users and developers feel betrayed and disappointed by the move, which they see as a violation of the open-source spirit and values. Open-source projects are supposed to be freely available to everyone and the code can be used for any purpose with the correct attribution. Ideally, improvements to the core code base should be contributed back to the main project to keep it healthy but thatâs not a requirement. The problem over the last 15 years or so is that many applications that started as open-source were adopted by large cloud providers to enhance their services, sometimes with a private fork, without providing any help or support to the initial project. Therefore, many of the software creators built companies around the success of their work (Redis in this case, but Mongo and Elasticsearch are other recent examples). But in almost every case, these creator-founded companies simply canât compete with the size and reach of the major providers and so new licenses are created that try to serve the original open-source users while protecting the viability of the company that supports the development of the software. Itâs a hard business. So why, particularly as a PostgreSQL user and community member, do I care about this? Well, I believe that PostgreSQL has been an outlier, and shining example, of what can happen when the software is truly developed, âownedâ, and supported by the community. With a very permissive license, the past 10 years has helped Postgres grow exponentially faster than if there was an alternative, self-protective license. I think one of the main reasons for this growth and support comes from the issues that Redis and others are often most frustrated with (money aside). If you join the PostgreSQL community Slack channel, youâll quickly see that many of the community questions refer to offerings from AWS, Microsoft, and Google. Sometimes the core contributors and long-time community supporters can get pretty frustrated that they have to keep trying to solve problems for features that are not a part of the core Postgres software⦠features added as part of a DBaaS offering. But as Postgres usage continues to grow, more cloud-specific questions are asked. Amid this tension, the providers also realized that they could help everyone involved by providing tangible support to the project. Most of this help has come over the last 5-6 years by creating special developer groups which are solely dedicated to contributing to the open-source PostgreSQL project. The developers donât have any special influence in which features get developed or supported by the community for inclusion in future releases, but they do provide invaluable experience and coding support for the most advanced open-source database in the world. I wonder if projects like Redis could learn something from this example? What about future open-source projects that might prepare differently as uptake and popularity grows? Whether the developers of an application are paid for their work or not, nothing about the project is free. If you only take from the project, donât be surprised when it backfires on you later. But who knows, if you can support the project in some way, âpayingâ with your time or skill, the future could look a lot different. What do you think? Ryan Booz [Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums]( Â
The Weekly News
All the headlines and interesting SQL Server information that we've collected over the past week, and sometimes even a few repeats if we think they fit.
Vendors/3rd Party Products [How to Fix or Avoid âIgnoredâ Migrations in Flyway]( Flyway has several ways of allowing you to make mistakes, or even experiment wildly, and then tidy up afterwards easily. In this article, I'll describe a few ways to persuade Flyway that you know what you're doing and that it needn't ignore a migration file. Administration of SQL Server [SQL Server Index Included Columns and Log Bloat]( From Curated SQL Forrest McDaniel explains that TANSTAAFL: Let me share the conclusion now: included columns in an index always get included in the log record, even if⦠[Get the most out of SQL Server Agent logs]( If you havenât migrated your workloads to a managed database platform yet, youâre probably still relying on SQL Server Agent for various maintenance and other scheduled tasks. Most of the time, these processes just work. But when itâs time to troubleshoot, it can be cumbersome to get to the root of some problems. In this post, Iâll share some ideas to help you minimize the level of annoyance and tedium when you have to figure out what went wrong with the execution of a job. Azure Databricks, Spark and Snowflake [Speeding up Databricks Lakehouse Queries with Redis]( From Curated SQL Drew Furgiuele has the need for speed: Since compute and storage are now separated, this means that any time you want to work with your⦠[Basic Analysis of Data with Snowflake]( From Sherpa of Data Now and again, youâll be asked to do some basic ... Community Interests [7 Best Online Advanced SQL Training Courses to Learn in 2024 and Beyond]( From SQLServerCentral Blogs The world runs on data, and SQL is the key to unlo... [Behind the Scenes: My Perspective as a Speaker at SQLBits]( From Purple Frog Systems SQLBits, the renowned conference for data professionals, brought together a diverse range of speakers this year, including four from Purple Frog Systems: myself, Lewis, Hollie, and Alex. Each of... Computing in the Cloud (Azure, Google, AWS) [Serverless Authentication methods in web apps]( Serverless authentication methods refer to approaches for managing user identity and access without the need for traditional server-based authentication systems. Instead of relying on a dedicated server, authentication tasks are outsourced to cloud-based services or specialized third-party providers. This allows developers to focus on application logic while leveraging secure, scalable, and often managed authentication solutions. Conferences, Classes, Events, and Webinars [Top 5 reasons to attend PASS Data Community Summit 2024]( From Blog â Redgate Software I donât know about you, but after the pandemic I... Data Visualisation [it's okay to use multiple graphs]( From Storytelling with Data A tip I regularly share when providing data visual...
DevOps and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) [CI/CD in GitHub]( From Curated SQL I have a new video: In this video, I explain what continuous integration (CI) is, disambiguate continuous delivery from continuous deployment (CD), and see how⦠DocumentDB/Key-Value/Graph/other NoSQL Databases [Building MongoDB Aggregations]( In the previous article in this series, I discussed how to use a find statement to retrieve data from a MongoDB collection. However, the find method is not the only option for retrieving document data. Another important method is aggregate, which lets you group documents, perform calculations on those groups, and in other ways extract the data you need from your database collections. ETL/SSIS/Azure Data Factory/Biml [The Importance of Orchestration in E(L)TL Processes]( From Curated SQL Martin Schoombee begins a new series: In the context of what weâre talking about throughout this series â facilitating the execution of an ETL process⦠MDX/DAX [Using EXPAND and COLLAPSE in visual calculations]( From Sqlbi See when EXPAND and COLLAPSE are required to obtai... Microsoft Fabric ( Azure Synapse Analytics, OneLake, ADLS, Data Science) [Initial testing of Mirroring Azure Cosmos DB Databases in Microsoft Fabric]( From Kevin Chant Reading Time: 6 minutes In this post I cover some... [Fabric and Azure SQL in a few clicks: Mirroring a Database]( From Simple Talk Finally, mirroring is available for Fabric! You can mirror an Azure SQL to Fabric. It works for CosmoDB and Snowflake as well, but in this article, I will focus... Oracle/PostgreSQL/MySQL/other RDBMS [Converting Cursors to PL/pgSQL]( From Curated SQL Deepak Mahto explains a difference in cursors from Oracle: In the blog, we will cover scenarios with cursors that differ from how Oracle handles them.⦠[Roles and Privileges in PostgreSQL]( From Curated SQL Muhammad Ali explains quite a few of the security terms in PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL has a fine grained system for for managing user roles and privileges.⦠[Transforming and Analyzing Data in PostgreSQL]( In our data hungry world, knowing how to effectively load and transform data from various sources is a highly valued skill. Over the last couple of years, Iâve learned how useful many of the data manipulation functions in PostgreSQL can supercharge your data transformation and analysis process, using just PostgreSQL and SQL. I hope by the end of this series youâll appreciate the capabilities of PostgreSQL and some of the advantages for doing data transformation within the database. [Using Common Table Expressions: Transforming and Analyzing Data in PostgreSQL, Part 2]( From Simple Talk In the first article in this transforming data ser... Performance Tuning SQL Server [bit Obscene Episode 3: The Habits Of Highly Successful Performance Tuners]( From Erik Darling Data bit Obscene Episode 3: The Habits Of Highly Succes... PowerPivot/PowerQuery/PowerBI [Accessibility Features in Power BI]( From Curated SQL Elena Drakulevska takes us through some of the accessibility features in Power BI: As data professionals, weâre constantly striving to create reports that effectively communicate⦠[Did you know you can create DAX measures directly in the Power BI Service using Visual Calculations]( From FourMoo There have been some updates to Power BI with Visu... [Using Stored Procedure as a Power BI Source (with parameters)]( From Purple Frog Systems Using a SQL Server stored procedure as a source in... [At last!!! Power Query within Power BI Report Builder!]( From Guy in a Cube With Power Query being available for Power BI Pagi... R Language [Replicating a Product Chart with ggplot2]( From Curated SQL Mauricio Vargas Sepúlveda makes some tea: Tetley tea boxes feature the following caffeine meter: In R we can replicate this meter using ggplot2. I enjoy⦠Software Development [The Making of VES: the Cosmos Microservice for Netflix Video Encoding]( From Netflix TechBlog - Medium Liwei Guo, Vinicius Carvalho, Anush Moorthy, Adity... [How to Use Any SQL Database With Rust]( From Simple Talk Rust is emerging as a frontrunner for ensuring memory safety without sacrificing performance. Its growing popularity isnât solely based on the âfearless concurrencyâ mantra but also on its expanding... T-SQL and Query Languages [Replace a SQL WHILE Loop with Set Based Logic in T-SQL]( From MSSQL Tips This article shows ways to replace a SQL WHILE loo...  [RSS Feed]( This email has been sent to {EMAIL}. To be removed from this list, please click [here](. If you have any problems leaving the list, please contact the webmaster@sqlservercentral.com. This newsletter was sent to you because you signed up at SQLServerCentral.com. Note: This is not the SQLServerCentral.com daily newsletter list, and unsubscribing to this newsletter will not stop you receiving the SQL Server Central daily newsletters. If you want to be removed from that list, you can follow the instructions on the daily newsletter.
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