Database choice can be one of the most challenge problems to any size of organization. It affects the accessibility of the data, the performance of the applications & many other aspects of a data pipeline. During this meetup, we have speakers from TimescaleDB - a time series database, & CockroachDB - a distributed SQL database to talk about the design of their databases. Come & enjoy a night of discussions of these new technologies!

Schedule:
6:30 - Doors & Food
7:00 - Intro & Talk 1
7:45 - Talk 2
8:30 - Wrap & Chat

Talk 1:TimescaleDB: Re-architecting a SQL database for time-series data

Speaker: Matvey Arye, Senior Software Engineer, TimescaleDB

Abstract:
When storing time-series data, many developers start with some well-trusted system like PostgreSQL, but as their data hits a certain scale, give up its query power & ecosystem by migrating to a NoSQL or other "modern" time-series architecture.

This trade-off is unnecessary, & we've built TimescaleDB, an efficient, scalable time-series database engineered up from Postgres so that developers arent forced into making it. At a high level, the nature of time-series workloads--appending data about recent events--presents different demands than transactional (OLTP) workloads. We've architected our time-series database to take advantage of & embrace these differences.

TimescaleDB improves insert rates by 20X over Postgres, even on a single node. By right-sizing chunks, it avoids the performance cliff Postgres experiences once reaching table sizes of 50+ million of rows, while offering compelling complex query performance improvements. TimescaleDB is packaged as a Postgres extension, released under the Apache 2 license.

Talk 2: The Hows & Whys of a Distributed SQL Database

Speaker: Masha Schneider, Member of Technical Staff, Cockroach Labs

Abstract:
Until recently, developers have had to deal with serious tradeoffs when picking a database technology. One could pick a SQL database & deal with its eventual scaling problems or pick a NoSQL database & have to work around its lack of transactions, strong consistency, and/or secondary indexes.

However, a new class of distributed database engines is emerging that combines the transactional consistency guarantees of traditional relational databases with the horizontal scalability & high availability of popular NoSQL databases.

In this talk, we'll then take a deep dive into the key design choices behind one open source distributed SQL database, CockroachDB, that enables it to offer such properties & compare them to past SQL & NoSQL designs. We will look specifically at how to achieve the easy deployment & management of a scalable, self-healing, strongly-consistent database with techniques such as dynamic sharding & rebalancing, consensus protocols, lock-free transactions, & more.