{"id":594,"date":"2020-04-18T18:13:44","date_gmt":"2020-04-19T02:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nathanbak.com\/?p=594"},"modified":"2026-01-02T20:05:19","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T04:05:19","slug":"a-database-i-want-to-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/?p=594","title":{"rendered":"A Database I Want to Use"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you’re only interested in connecting your ESP8266 to a database, skip to the bottom paragraph. If you’re not interested in databases, read the whole thing.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I am not interested in databases. As a software developer, I understand the value of a good database and I like using databases to store\/retrieve\/search\/etc. data. The part I don’t like is the setting up, configuring, optimizing, scaling, maintaining, and other tasks required to keep a database up-and-running. I want to spend my time writing code rather than babysitting a database. I want to use a database, not run a database.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nearly four years ago when playing with my then new ESP8266 I needed a database and I ended up going with REDIS and WEBDIS<\/a> because it was the lowest bar to entry that I could find for my requirements. It has worked well-enough for my needs, but nothing to rave about. I’ve spent the past two years making something exponentially better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2018 I joined Datastax<\/a> which is the most important company behind the NoSQL database Apache Cassandra<\/a>. Cassandra was not a database that I wanted to use. While the performance, scalability and reliability of Cassandra are unsurpassed, the complexity to get Cassandra ready to go and keep it running was a deal breaker for someone like me that isn’t interested in being a DB admin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a Senior Software Engineer on the Datastax Cloud Team I had various responsibilities, but my personal goal was to create a database I wanted to use. The team succeeded with Datastax Astra<\/a> which is a “Cloud-native Database-as-a-Service built on Apache Cassandra”. That means I can just go to a website, fill in a few details, click a button, and seconds later I have a database I can use. It’s awesome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My day job was working to make Datastax Astra a database I wanted to use and finally I am able to spend my weekends using it. I created an Arduino library called astra_esp8266<\/a> which makes it easy for an ESP8266 to communicate with a database. The source code is available on github<\/a> but most users will probably just want to install the library into an Arduino IDE<\/a>. After four years, with two of those years taking thousands of hours of my time, there is now a database that I want to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’re only interested in connecting your ESP8266 to a database, skip to the bottom paragraph. If you’re not interested in databases, read the whole thing. I am not interested in databases. As a software developer, I understand the value of a good database and I like using databases to store\/retrieve\/search\/etc. data. The part I … Continue reading “A Database I Want to Use”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,10],"class_list":["post-594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-esp8266","tag-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=594"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":599,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594\/revisions\/599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanbak.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}