In addition to the public events we hold at Yelp, every Friday an engineer at Yelp presents on a topic they’re passionate about. The talks range from topics far afield from computers, to technical deep dives on some of the core trade-offs we make at Yelp. I’m happy to share one of the latter today, as   Garrett J. takes us through the history of databases. From Codd’s description of the relational model, through the challenges Cassandra was designed to solve, this video gives a great overview of current options in database technology. <iframe frameborder="0" height="281" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/65601864" width="500"></iframe>  Slides -...

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Ever been woken up at 3am by a misbehaving database query?   Jenni S., Yelp’s MySQL DBA, walks us through Yelp’s system to prevent such rude awakenings. Here at Yelp, we push multiple times a day.  We do this safely and surely with our process of code review, integration,   automated testing, and extensive monitoring.  I think that we’re all used to the idea of automated testing for our code, but what about the queries generated by the application against the database? Catch potential problem queries in testing, not production In most engineering organizations, it’s common for the development, build,...

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