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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Guest Post on the AWS Open Source Blog: Using PostgreSQL with Spring Boot on AWS

Last week, another two-part article by Tom Hombergs, Philip Riecks, and me was published on the AWS Open Source Blog. Thanks a lot to Ricardo Sueiras for making this possible. This time around we wrote about how to use a PostgreSQL database with Amazon RDS and Spring Boot: Using PostgreSQL with Spring Boot on AWS — Part 1 Using PostgreSQL with Spring Boot on AWS — Part 2 These articles draw upon the chapter Connecting to a Database with Amazon RDS from our eBook Stratospheric ...
Sunday October 3rd, 2021 by Bjoern in General
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Rarely Used But Useful PostgreSQL Features

I'm an avid user of SQL and the variety of - frequently overlooked - features it provides. However, unfortunately the possibilities of SQL and modern, advanced open source incarnations of RDBMS such as PostgreSQL aren't utilised to the extent they could be when developing web or enterprise applications today. More often than not SQL database are perceived as a mere data store for persisting object-oriented data, which can give rise to the famous object-relational impedance mismatch. SQL servers, PostgreSQL in particular, are capable ...
Sunday October 27th, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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R2DBC: Reactive Relational Database Connectivity for Java and Spring

As I mentioned in a blog post last week with Reactor and Spring WebFlux reactive programming has come to Java and the Spring platform. R2DBC is relatively new project that aims to "to bring a reactive programming API to relational data stores". While currently still considered experimental, R2DBC endeavours to introduce reactive programming to how we access relational databases (reactive relational, hence the R2 in the name). This means that instead of the traditional way of querying SQL databases imperatively with prepared statements ...
Sunday March 17th, 2019 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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BedquiltDB – A JSON document store for PostgreSQL

BedquiltDB is a recently released PostgreSQL extension (written mostly in PL/pgSQL) that leverages PostgreSQL's relatively new jsonb column type (available since version 9.4) to provide a MongoDB-like NoSQL document store and API on top of a PostgreSQL database. There are a few benefits to this approach. First, this allows you to start a project with a comparatively simple document-oriented API that lends itself to many use cases in terms of modern web applications. While you get this with your usual NoSQL, document-oriented databases ...
Sunday May 15th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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Hands-on SQL Tips: Sentinels And Window Functions

Sometimes when displaying data in an application you want the amount of data (rows, individual data points etc.) to be limited for the app to stay responsive and to allow the user to more easily scan and browse the data set. In SQL this is commonly done using a LIMIT statement: [crayon-66285c93293ee418980381/] Now, what if you want to not only display the data but also inform the user in case the total number of rows in the table exceeds the limit set by ...
Sunday April 10th, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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Modern SQL (with PostgreSQL)

SQL expert Markus Winand some time ago posted an insightful presentation on Modern SQL (mostly PostgreSQL-focussed) at SlideShare. The 116 slides contain plenty of modern SQL idioms you likely haven't used before. Even if you're an experienced SQL developer the presentation is still worth checking out.
Sunday June 28th, 2015 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software, Web Applications
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