All posts by Philip O'Toole

Building Secure and Reliable Systems at Google

I recently started reading Building Secure and Reliable Systems, which was authored by various folks at Google (some of whom I know). Since my work is at the intersection of so much of this — reliable logging systems which must also be secure, it’s an interesting read.

In my experience, the most challenging part about securing our systems are the constant trade-offs one needs to make. Since no system can be made 100% secure, knowing where the marginal risk is no longer worth addressing is quite difficult — I’m hoping this book improves my ability to make these trade-offs correctly.

rqlite 7.5.0: Trading durability for write performance

rqlite is an open-source, lightweight, distributed relational database, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Written in Go, It’s trivial to deploy, and easy to use.

Release 7.5.0 adds Queued Writes. This is the first time rqlite allows users to trade-off durability for much higher write performance.

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Testing rqlite read consistency

rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine.

Nienke Eijsvogel, Ruben van Baarle and Daan de Graaf recently ran Jepsen-style testing of rqlite. Their tests showed that rqlite maintains linearizability of record insertion and modification, provided strong read consistency is enabled.  Check out the full results on GitHub.

rqlite 7.0: Designing Node Discovery and Automatic Clustering

rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine and Raft for distributed consensus. Release 7.0 is out now and introduces the first wave of new Node Discovery and Automatic Clustering  features.

Continue reading rqlite 7.0: Designing Node Discovery and Automatic Clustering