No one wants to create backups; everyone just wants to be able to restore data – that’s the old saying in IT. However, to be able to restore data, backups need to be created on a regular basis. To ensure that major disasters can be survived, the backups should be stored in a different location. In this article, the software Duplicity is used to create automated backups and store them on an AWS S3 bucket in the AWS cloud. These backups are encrypted using GPG.

BBoxDB is a distributed key-bounding-box-value store written in Java. The software provides the bboxdb-commons package that contains some helper classes for handling and processing spatial data. Some of these classes can be used to process intervals and hyperrectangles in Java. This post gives some practical examples how these classes can be used.

The PostgreSQL database server is written in the programming language C. This article describes how dynamic memory is handled in the PostgreSQL database server. In contrast to plain C programs, MemoryContexts are used.

The PostgreSQL database server contains many Assert statements in its code. These statements are additional checks that can be evaluated to ensure that the performed operations are executed as expected. However, evaluating these statements takes some CPU time. Therefore, they are disabled in most production environments.

Kubernetes is one of the most popular container orchestrators these days. In this post, it is shown how the software can be installed on bare-metal servers or virtual servers by using kubeadm and Ansible.