Bitcoin & Blockchain must reads

By now, I am habituated to read headlines such as “Bitcoin reaches latest high, Inches closer to X0,000”. X keeps changing every day!  But most people are unaware of the fundamentals of what bitcoin is, how blockchain works and how it may change humanity.

While quenching my thirst for Bitcoin knowledge,  I came across some gems. I want to share the gems with you so that you can learn more about about Bitcoin in minimal reading/listening or watching.

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Using AWS Database Migration Service to replicate data from MySQL to Redshift

AWS’s Database Migration Service (DMS) is often misunderstood as a service that can only migrate your data to the cloud. But the service could be very useful for replicating data between the two datastores within the cloud as well. In our case, both of our datastores – RDS (MySQL) and Redshift were already in the cloud. The MySQL database is our primary OLTP database and many of our employees login to an internal application to modify data within this database. This database contains all of our dimension tables. Our reporting dashboard connects with our data warehouse built on Redshift. This database contains all of our fact tables. In order to run the reports accurately it’s important that all the modifications done to the dimension tables in MySQL are transferred to Redshift in timely manner.

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How to enable and set Rolling for MySQL General Log in a MySQL RDS Instance

Enabling general log in your MySQL RDS instance can be very useful. Especially for auditing and accountability purposes. It’s usually useful to debug problems too. General log can log every single query on your database in mysql.general_log table. Alternatively you can also log all the queries to a log file, but in RDS instance, logging them to a table was the best option in our  situation. More information about general log can be obtained from MySQL documentation

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Lambda Architecture with Druid at GumGum

In early 2014, we were faced with a challenge: As our data grew, our current real-time data storage was no longer able to support our growth. We looked for other real-time ingestion systems, and that’s when one of our engineers, Maxime, came across Druid. Let’s backtrack for a minute. The “we” in this story is GumGum, inventors of In-Image Advertising and a leading digital marketing platform based in Santa Monica, the heart of Silicon Beach. The company was founded in 2007, and its data has consistently quadrupled in recent years. We’ve welcomed and embraced this rapid growth, but it’s also kept us in the market for a system that can handle a lot of data.

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