Category: technology-exploration

usql: The Universal command-line interface for SQL databases

Recently I discovered a useful utility called usql while trying to find a better CLI for MySQL. I personally prefer psql PostgreSQL command-line tool so I was trying to find a similar tool for MySQL. During my search for the psql like MySQL CLI I stumbled upon usql – universal command-line interface for SQL database. I like playing with CLI tools as they play a big role in improving the developer experience.

I discovered that there is another popular project in Microsoft world with the same name. It is called U-SQL. U-SQL is the new big data query language of the Azure Data Lake Analytics service.

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Microsoft’s Distributed Application Runtime (Dapr)

We are living in a world where every other day we see a new technical innovation. For most of us mere mortal it is not easy to quickly figure out if the technology is worth our time. Making sense of new technical innovations is one of the core aspects of my current role so by taking the pain of writing this series I will help myself as well.

In this post, I will cover Dapr. Dapr stands for distributed application runtime.

What does distributed application runtime means?

These days most of us are developing distributed systems. If you are building an application that uses Microservices architecture then you are building a distributed system.

A distributed system is a collection of autonomous computing elements that appears to its users as a single coherent system.

Distributed application runtime provides you the facilities that you can use to build distributed systems. These facilities include:

  1. State management. Most applications need to talk to a datastore to store state. Common examples like PostgreSQL, Redis, etc.
  2. Pub/sub. For communication between different components and services.
  3. Service to service communication. This also includes retries, circuit breaking.
  4. Observability. To bring visibility into systems.
  5. Secret management. For storing password and keys.
  6. Many other

One important thing to note is that these are application level concerns. Distributed application runtime does not concern itself with infrastructure or network level concerns.

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