Learn how to create a financial data application using asyncpg and PostgreSQL ..read more

TimescaleDB is a powerful, open-source time-series database built on top of PostgreSQL to efficiently manage time-series data, events, and analytics. Optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, it speaks “full SQL” and is correspondingly easy to use like a traditional relational database, yet scales in ways previously reserved for NoSQL databases.  This guide will walk you through the process of setting up TimescaleDB on Microsoft Azure, ensuring you have a scalable and high-performance database ready to handle your time-series data needs. What you'll learn: Getting started with Azur ..read more

Artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from science fiction to breathtaking reality in just a few years. How did we get here, and where do we go from here? What lessons can we learn from the history of AI, and how can they help us predict the evolution of artificial intelligence? This article is for anyone trying to understand AI and how it may shape our world. It’s also the first of a two-part series on AI's history (this article) and future (the next article). I initially wrote this article for my father. My father is a tech entrepreneur. Born and raised in India, he attended IIT (Indian Ins ..read more

TimescaleDB is a powerful, open-source database built on top of PostgreSQL to efficiently manage time-series data, events, and analytics. Optimized for fast ingest and complex queries, it speaks “full SQL” and is correspondingly easy to use like a traditional relational database, yet scales in ways previously reserved for NoSQL databases.  This guide will walk you through setting up TimescaleDB on Amazon Web Services (AWS), ensuring you have a scalable and high-performance database ready to handle your time-series data needs. What you'll learn: How to get started with AWS Setting up you ..read more

One of the most popular and well-supported open-source databases, PostgreSQL has been a staple in the data management world for decades. As cloud computing evolves, serverless architectures are not just a trend but a growing reality, offering easy and efficient database scaling. Unsurprisingly, serverless PostgreSQL has become an enticing option for many organizations. But like any technological advancement, it comes with its own set of challenges and considerations. This article explores serverless PostgreSQL's benefits, limitations, and strategies for maximizing its potential.  What Is ..read more

Object-relational mappings (ORMs) connect object-oriented programming languages to databases. With an ORM, developers can access relational databases like PostgreSQL while leveraging an object-oriented model. The object-oriented wrapping and familiar language interface make ORMs popular with developers. However, ORMs come with downsides as well. Let’s take a look at ORMs to see where they work and where they struggle. What Is Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)? In general, an ORM is an application API layer that connects an object-oriented system to a relational database that uses SQL as its pri ..read more

Your database needs reliable backups. Data loss events could occur at any point in time. A developer may drop a table by mistake, even replicated storage drives may fail and start producing read errors, software bugs may cause silent data corruption, applications may perform incorrect modifications, and so on. You may hope this will not occur to you, but hope is not a strategy. The key to reliably preventing data loss or enabling data recovery is to perform regular backups. In this post, we’ll cover how we deploy PostgreSQL on Kubernetes (for our TimescaleDB instances) and how this deployment ..read more

Open-source large language models (LLMs) are a top choice for developers building AI applications like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), search, and AI agents. In contrast to proprietary models, open-source models are private, free to use (hardware costs aside), can run locally, and can be easily customized for your use case. But getting started with open-source LLMs can be tricky.  That’s where Ollama comes in. Ollama is the easiest and most popular way to get up and running with open-source language models. Think of Ollama as “Docker for LLMs,” enabling easy access and usage of a v ..read more

Public datasets can help us gain insight into our business and our world. Combining public datasets, either together or with our own data, often requires a series of steps to clean up (or “normalize”) the data. This blog post walks you through some data normalization techniques. I enjoy using public datasets, combining them with metrics and business data, and seeing if there are any correlations. It’s kind of a personal hobby. I wrote a blog post about analyzing COVID-19 data along that vein. My projects usually aim to combine data from one source with data from another source to learn someth ..read more

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) is Amazon's database hosting service that allows you to run relational databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and Db2 in the cloud. RDS handles database management tasks so you can focus on creating your apps. While RDS is a great service for hosting cloud databases, it has some limitations for high-volume or specialized use cases, which we’ll cover later. Understanding the pros and cons of RDS can help you decide when to use the service and when to seek a different solution. In this article, we’ll: Take a look at the services and lim ..read more