Welcome to the first-ever edition of the CedarDB newsletter. Thanks for following us on our journey. Since we planted the sapling for our company at the end of May, we received much attention and incredible feedback. We started to work with small-scale pilots, which benefit directly from CedarDB, while we iron out some of the kinks in our system. We are also working on the general availability of an alpha release, so stay tuned.
In the meantime, we wanted to keep you up to date on what we were up to:
What’s new at CedarDB
We started publishing Blog posts
- In our ode to Postgres (https://cedardb.com/blog/ode_to_postgres/), we described our vision of how CedarDB as a new system can alleviate some of the pains that come with using long existing database solutions.
- The next blog post was about our academic contribution with TUM, where we worked on efficient join processing: https://cedardb.com/blog/simple_efficient_hash_tables/
- We also asked ourselves the question “When are SSDs slow?“, and described how we squeeze the most performance out of any SSD: https://cedardb.com/blog/ssd_latency/
- And lastly, we published a tutorial on how you can work with JSON and Graphs in CedarDB: https://cedardb.com/blog/working_with_json_and_graphs/
Database Changes
Compatibility improvements & more
- We focused on improving the stability of CedarDB and increasing compatibility with existing clients for PostgreSQL. For example, we added more than 60 PostgreSQL compatible system tables. Many database tools like DataGrip (https://cedardb.com/docs/clients/datagrip/) or DBeaver (https://cedardb.com/docs/clients/dbeaver/) depend on such tables for introspection, which powers, e.g. their powerful tab-completion.
- We also ensured that CedarDB is compatible with a wide range of off-the-shelve PostgreSQL clients. In our docs, we describe how programming language clients (https://cedardb.com/docs/clients/) in C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, R, or Rust can be used to interface with CedarDB.
To support this, we added support for common functionality for connection pooling (https://cedardb.com/docs/references/sqlreference/statements/discard/), and binary data transmission. - In addition, we made CSV handling in CedarDB much more robust. When you don’t get one of the six parameters for loading CSV data (https://cedardb.com/docs/references/sqlreference/statements/copy/) quite right on the first try, CedarDB now prints a friendly error message with the mismatching data. Additionally, we infer correct settings, and show them as a suggestion.
- We also made our parser more friendly to accept trailing commas. Many modern languages like JavaScript accept trailing commas in arrays, but PostgreSQL notoriously throws syntax errors when the last element of a select list ends with a comma.
- We also have accumulated around 50 commits in our commit log dedicated to fixing various bugs. Further, we made small improvements to string hashing and comparisons in group-by and join hash tables, which should improve query performance slightly when joining or aggregating over string keys.
Events we attended
XPRENEURS Demo Day
Since March this year, we took part in the XPRENEURS Start Up Incubator at Europe’s leading start-up hub UnternehmerTUM, which we successfully graduated in early June. We had the incredible opportunity to pitch CedarDB and its technology at their Demo Day.
Munich Data Meetups
Photo by TUMuchData
We had the opportunity to talk about CedarDB’s technology and internals at the Munich Database Meetup and the TUM Venture Labs Software and AI Meetup, where Philipp and Moritz talked about the advantages of an All-In-One database system and what it takes to build one.
Meeting the US Minister Counselor for Economic Affairs
Moritz was selected to meet with the US Minister Counselor for Economic Affairs, Stephen Anderson, and discussed the challenges and opportunities for European start-ups and what could be done to increase transatlantic start-up cooperation.
Thank you!
That’s all for today. We’re looking forward to sharing more awesome progress in our next newsletter!
Catch ya next time!
Your CedarDB Team
