Mar 23Practical Data Analysis with SQLSQL databases have been around since the 1970s. Some of the smartest people in the world worked on making it easy to slice, dice, fetch and manipulate data quickly and efficiently. SQL databases have come such a long way that many developers and data scientists have lost track of what…Sql3 min readSql3 min read
Mar 3, 2021Exciting New Features in Django 3.2Django 3.2 is just around the corner and it’s packed with new features. Django versions are usually not that exciting (it’s a good thing!), but this time many features were added to the ORM, so I find it especially interesting! Check out the full article on hakibenita.com >>Django1 min readDjango1 min read
Feb 1, 2021The Unexpected Find That Freed 20GB of Unused Index SpaceEvery few months we get an alert from our database monitoring to warn us that we are about to run out of space. Usually we just provision more storage and forget about it, but this time we were under quarantine, and the system in question was under less load than…Database1 min readDatabase1 min read
Jan 11, 2021Re-Introducing Hash Indexes in PostgreSQLIf you work with databases you are probably familiar with B-Tree indexes. They are used to enforce unique and primary-key constraints, and are the default index type in most database engines. If you work with text, geography or other complex types in PostgreSQL, you may have dipped your toes into…Postgres1 min readPostgres1 min read
Sep 21, 2020Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQLMany developers think that having a critical bug in their code is the worst thing that can happen. Well, there is something much worse than that: Having a critical bug in your code and not knowing about it! To make sure I get notified about critical bugs as soon as…Sql1 min readSql1 min read
Jul 27, 2020Some SQL Tricks of an Application DBAWhen I started my career in development, my first job was a DBA. Back then, before AWS RDS, Azure, Google Cloud and the rest of them cloud services, there were two types of DBAs: The Infrastructure DBA was in charge of setting up the database, configuring the storage and taking…Database2 min readDatabase2 min read
Jun 1, 2020Stop Using datetime.now!Practical Dependency Injection in Python — One of my favorite job interview questions is this: Write a function that returns tomorrow’s date This looks innocent enough for someone to suggest this as a solution: This will work, but there is a followup question: How would you test this function? Before you move on…. take a second…Python1 min readPython1 min read
May 6, 2020How to Move a Django Model to Another AppIn my latest article for RealPython I share three ways to tackle one of the most challenging tasks involving Django migrations: moving a model from one Django app to another. The article covers some exotic migration operations and many of the built-in migration CLI commands such sqlmigrate, showmigrations and sqlsequencereset…Django1 min readDjango1 min read
May 1, 2020Testing an Interactive Voice Response System With Python and PytestFollowing my previous article on how to build an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with Twilio, Python and Django, in this follow-up tutorial I show how to write automated tests for this system. It can be very challenging to test a system that rely heavily on a third party service…Coding1 min readCoding1 min read
Mar 30, 2020Using Markdown in DjangoOriginally published at https://hakibenita.com on February 11, 2020. Read this article on by blog with proper syntax highlighting. As developers, we rely on static analysis tools to check, lint and transform our code. We use these tools to help us be more productive and produce better code. However, when we…Writing12 min readWriting12 min read
