Efficiency at Scale: A Tale of AWS Cost Optimization
Understanding total spend is a common challenge for cloud users, especially on projects with complex pricing models. This article explores the top AWS cost optimizations that will help you scale your platform effectively.

Rudolf Eremyan
Solving Bottlenecks With SQL Indexes and Partitions
Indexes and partitioning can help with SQL performance, but they’re not cure-alls. Through everyday examples of date range and LIKE queries, find out how to “think like an RDBMS” to make yours run faster.

Mirko Marović
SQL Indexes Explained, Pt. 2
Sorting a table can make some queries faster—but the maintenance cost is untenable. Enter real database indexes and their most common implementation structure: the B-tree.

Mirko Marović
SQL Indexes Explained, Pt. 1
Properly used, an SQL database index can be so effective that it might seem like magic. But the following series of exercises will show that underneath, the logic of most SQL indexes—and wielding them correctly—is quite straightforward.

Mirko Marović
Developing a Bioinformatics Database for Disulfide Bonds Research
The Protein Data Bank (PDB) bioinformatics database is the world’s largest repository of experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies. All data is gathered using experimental methods such as X-ray, spectroscopy, crystallography, NMR, etc. This article explains how to extract, filter, and clean data from the PDB to make it suitable for further analysis.

Viktor Bojović
Database Design Bad Practices: Are You Making These Mistakes?
Flaws in your database design are like cracks in your application’s foundations. If left unchecked, trying to fix them down the line will be costly to say the least.
In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Fernando Martinez discusses some of the most common database design bad practices and how to avoid them.

Fernando Martinez
Guide to Data Synchronization in Microsoft SQL Server
Sharing related information among isolated systems has become increasingly important. There are many methods to choose from to perform that task for SQL Server, but it’s important to know which is better for each use case.

Andrej Gajdos
PhalconPHP: A Solution for High-load RESTful APIs
PhalconPHP will make your high-load application fast and easy, it’s one of the fastest MVC frameworks for PHP available. It’s written in C and supplied as a compiled PHP extension, so it doesn’t need to be interpreted at every request. Consider PhalconPHP for your next project, you won’t regret it.

Andrew Belousoff
Realm Is the Best Android Database Solution
Since the inception of the platform, Android developers have had pretty much only one option for a database: SQLite. Although feature-rich and powerful, it wasn’t quite what Android app developers needed. Realm, a modern, efficient database solution for mobile platforms, turned out to be an amazing replacement for SQLite on Android.
In this article, Toptal Software Engineer Mateus Gondim Romão Batista explains why you should use Realm for your next Android application.

Mateus Gondim Romão Batista
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