The Unexpected Find That Freed 20GB of Unused Index Space
In this article I describe the process we took to identify potential free space, and one surprising find that helped up clear up ~10GB of unused indexed values!
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Re-Introducing Hash Indexes in PostgreSQL
There is a type of index you are probably not using, and may have never even heard of. It is wildly unpopular, and until a few PostgreSQL versions ago it was highly discouraged and borderline unusable, but under some circumstances it can out-perform even a B-Tree index.
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2020 Year in Review
What I've been up to in 2020...
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Exhaustiveness Checking with Mypy
What if mypy could warn you about possible problems at "compile time"? In this article I share a little trick to get mypy to fail when a value in an enumeration type is left unhandled.
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The Surprising Impact of Medium-Size Texts on PostgreSQL Performance
Any database schema is likely to have plenty of text fields. In this article I demonstrate the surprising impact of medium-size texts on query performance.
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Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL
Many developers think that having a critical bug in their code is the worse thing that can happen. Well, there is something much worst than that: Having a critical bug in your code and not knowing about it! Using some high school level statistics and a fair knowledge of SQL, I implemented a very simple anomaly detection system.
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Some SQL Tricks of an Application DBA
Some tips and misconceptions about database development I gathered along the way.
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Stop Using datetime.now!
If you ever had a test that one day just started to fail, unprovoked, or a test that fails once every blue moon for no apparent reason, it's possible your code is relying on something that is not deterministic. In this article I describe a practical approach to dependency injection in Python that when used correctly, can eliminate nondeterminism and make your code easier to maintain and to test.
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How to Move a Django Model to Another App
In my latest article for RealPython I cover some exotic migration operations, many of the built-in migration CLI commands and demonstrate important migrations concepts such as reversible migrations, migration plans and introspection.
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Testing an Interactive Voice Response System With Python and Pytest
It can be very challenging to test a system that rely heavily on a third party service such as Twilio. In this article, I show how to organize your code in a way that would isolate your bushiness logic and make it easier for you to test it separately.
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