Philip O'Toole
Philip O'Toole
I sometimes read commentary about large software companies and notice a recurring pattern. People correctly identify real characteristics of large organizations, criticize them, but show little appreciation for why those characteristics exist in the first place.
Continue reading “Common misunderstandings about large software companies”
I work as an Engineering Manager at Google, and my teams practice a simple habit – we book all meetings to start at five minutes past the hour (or half hour).
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database built on SQLite and Raft.
Versions 9.3.5 through 9.3.10 focus on internal correctness and operational robustness, particularly around Raft snapshotting, WAL handling, and testing. These releases also include improvements to logging, the rqlite shell, and routine dependency upgrades, including a new SQLite release.
Continue reading “rqlite 9.3.5 to 9.3.10: Snapshot Robustness, WAL Handling, and Shell Improvements”
rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database built on SQLite and Raft.
Versions 9.3.1 through 9.3.4 deliver a set of targeted fixes and internal improvements, most of them aimed at code quality, security posture, and correctness. The only user-facing operational change is that the official Docker image now runs the rqlite daemon as a non-root user.
rqlite is a lightweight, user-friendly, distributed relational database. It’s written in Go, employs Raft for distributed consensus, and uses SQLite as its storage engine.
The newly released rqlite 9.2 introduces a major improvement to startup performance – nodes can now resume from where they left off, instead of rebuilding their state from scratch on every restart. This change means that even if a node manages gigabytes of SQLite data, it can come back online almost instantly, with startup time no longer proportional to dataset size.
In this post, I’ll explore why this change matters, how it was implemented on top of the existing Raft system and SQLite WAL, and what it says about rqlite’s evolution.
Continue reading “Balancing SQLite’s WAL, SYNCHRONOUS=OFF, and fsync for fast rqlite recovery”
rqlite
is a lightweight, open-source distributed relational database implemented in Go, and which uses SQLite as its storage engine.
rqlite container images are now mirrored to GitHub Container Registry (GHCR). Images on Docker Hub and GHCR carry the same tags and digests; you can pull from either registry based on your preferences or network policy. This change should improve reliability and make it easier to integrate rqlite into environments that standardize on GHCR.
Continue reading “rqlite images now available on GitHub Container Registry”
My teams recently delivered support for the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) into Google Cloud Observability. This marks a significant step toward open, vendor-neutral observability.
By adopting OTLP, customers gain interoperability across tools, simpler data pipelines, and a future-proof path as the ecosystem standardizes. The change strengthens data quality in Cloud Trace today and sets the stage for metrics and logs to follow.
You can read the full announcement on the Google Cloud blog.
I was recently interviewed by Noah Brier for his BRXND Tokens & Tactics AI newsletter. Noah and I used to work together a few years ago at Percolate so it was good to connect again.
You can check out the interview here.
rqlite is a lightweight, user-friendly, open-source, distributed relational database. It’s written in Go, employs Raft for distributed consensus, and uses SQLite as its storage engine.
rqlite 9.0 introduces Change Data Capture (CDC), enabling you to stream the changes occurring to the underlying SQLite database to other systems. With CDC, rqlite is no longer just a distributed database—it’s a live event source. So let’s take a look at what the latest release allows us to do, and some of the design challenges that needed solving — especially building Change Data Capture on SQLite.
Continue reading “rqlite 9.0: Real-time Change Data Capture for Distributed SQLite”
