Holistics Blog: Engineering

At Holistics, we use Sidekiq, the de facto standard background processing framework for Ruby. By combining the reliability feature of Sidekiq Pro and our own retry logic, we can be assured that no back-end job gets lost or forgotten. Yet for a while, there were process management issues that we had not been able to solve effectively.

Gracefully restarting worker processes

In order to restart a Sidekiq worker, the recommended way is to send SIGTERM, which is the signal sent to a process to...

Being an analytics/reporting product company, we’ve worked with a fair amount of customers who run Postgres/Redshift for their analytics, and the same fair amount who uses MySQL.

And from our experience with both, I’d prefer our new customers to use Postgres all the time. For reporting/analytics/data-warehouse purpose, Postgres wins over MySQL hands-down.

In this post I lay down a few practical reasons why working with Postgres is so much better than MySQL from a data analyst perspective...