Architecture Weekly #119 - 20th March 2023

?Welcome to the new week with the latest #ArchitectureWeekly !

?? https://www.architecture-weekly.com/p/architecture-weekly-119-20th-march

Postgres is a shapeshifter. In Marten , we're changing it into a document database and event store. We provide built-in read models. Projecting events straight into Postgres gives you enough power for most common cases. Yet, sometimes you need to do more.

I wrote in my last article about how you could build a projection to other databases using Elasticsearch as an example:

• Oskar Dudycz - Projecting Marten events to Elasticsearch

Gunnar Morling also wrote an incredible guide on how to use Postgres Write-Ahead Log as a source of events, notifications and a backbone of the message flow.

• Gunnar Morling - The Wonders of Postgres Logical Decoding Messages

Postgres is great, but do you know what’s the most deployed relational database? It’s SQLite . It can be used, and it’s used anywhere. You can also run it on edge, IoT, and WebAssembly, making it potentially a building block of the decentralised infrastructure. That’s what Philip O'Toole is trying to do with RQLite. Read more in his lessons learned from building it last nine years:

• Philip O'Toole - 9 years of open-source database development

Are databases must haves?

What if I told you you could scale your system to millions of users using Google Sheets as storage? Ok, I won’t. I’ll let Levels.fyi told you how they do it:

• Levels.fyi - How Levels.fyi scaled to millions of users with Google Sheets as a backend

Now homework for you. Could you do it with your system by replacing your database with some other eccentric type of storage? How would you approach that if you had to?

Interesting Architecture composition with unusual building blocks is explained in the following article:

• Zied Ben Tahar - Building an AI powered and Serverless meal planner with OpenAI, AWS Step functions, AWS Lambda and CDK

It’s worth doing mind exercises by putting a limitation on you and thinking about how you could approach your design without having all the basic building blocks that you just blindly assume. Not always will something new show up, but you may be surprised by what you find.

Read also a nice explanation of how ATM infrastructure works. This can also be nice gymnastic as it also might not be how you expect it:

• Patrick McKenzie - The infrastructure behind ATMs

Get all links at: https://www.architecture-weekly.com/p/architecture-weekly-119-20th-march .

Cheers

Oskar

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