Good vs Bad Leader
Software is more about people than technology. When I graduated from college, I thought I only had to master technical skills to be a great developer, thinking that people skills are the appanage of managers solely. But experience taught me a good lesson on this one. Whenever I hear that people skills can’t be acquired, and you have to be a born with them, I just beg to differ. Nobody is born with any given skill, we learn through observation and by copying others (our role-models). You might get some valuable info… Read More
NoSQL is not just about BigData
Introduction There is so much debate on the SQL vs NoSQL subject, and probably this is our natural way of understanding and learning what’s the best way of storing data. After publishing the small experiment on MongoDB aggregating framework, I was challenged by the JOOQ team to match my results against Oracle. Matching MongoDB and Oracle is simply honoring Mongo, as Oracle is probably the best SQL DB engine. Being a simple experiment, it’s dangerous to draw any conclusion, since I was only testing the out-of-the-box Mongo performance, without taking advantage of… Read More
MongoDB Facts: Lightning fast aggregation
In my previous post, I demonstrated how fast you can insert 50 millions time-event entries with MongoDB. This time, we will make use of all that data to fuel our aggregation tests.
Why I like Spring bean aliasing
Spring framework is widely used as a dependency injection container, and that’s for good reasons. First of all, it facilitates integration testing and it gives us the power of customizing bean creation and initialization (e.g. @Autowired for List types). But there is also a very useful feature, that might get overlooked and therefore let’s discuss about bean aliasing. Bean aliasing allows us to override already configured beans and to substitute them with a different object definition. This is most useful when the bean definitions are inherited from an external resource, which is… Read More
JPA Criteria API can generate unexpected SQL statements
Introduction In this article, we are going to learn why you should always check the SQL statements generated by JPA Criteria API queries when using Hibernate. Criteria API is very useful for dynamically building queries, but that’s the only use case where I’d use it. Whenever you have a UI with N filters that may arrive in any M combinations, it makes sense to have an API to construct queries dynamically since concatenating strings is always a path I’m running away from. The question is, are you aware of the SQL queries… Read More
JOOQ Facts: From JPA Annotations to JOOQ Table Mappings
JOOQ is a neat framework, and it addresses a long-time issue I’ve had with advanced dynamic filtered queries. While Hibernate and JPA come with a useful Criteria API, which I’ve been using for quite some time, there are understandable limits to what you can do with those. For instance, you cannot go beyond simple SQL operations (e.g JOINS, NESTED SLECTS, AGGREGATION) and do something like: window functions, user-defined functions or easy sequencing to name a few. JOOQ doesn’t feel like competing with Hibernate, but instead, I feel like it completes it. I’ve… Read More
Hibernate integration testing strategies
Introduction I like integration testing. As I explained in this article, it’s a good way to check what SQL queries are generated by Hibernate behind the scenes. But integration tests require a running database server, and this is the first choice you have to make. Using a production-like local database server for Integration Testing For a production environment, I always prefer using incremental DDL scripts, since I can always know what version is deployed on a given server, and which scripts required to be deployed. I’ve been relying on Flyway to manage… Read More
MongoDB Facts: 80000+ inserts/second on commodity hardware
Introduction While experimenting with some time series collections I needed a large data set to check that our aggregation queries don’t become a bottleneck in case of increasing data loads. We settled for 50 million documents since beyond this number we would consider sharding anyway. Each time event looks like this: As we wanted to get random values, we thought of generating them using JavaScript or Python (we could have tried in in Java, but we wanted to write it as fast as possible). We didn’t know which one will be faster… Read More
