Spectral Core Blog

Choosing a Database Without Hype and Buzz

The modern informational technology industry is obsessed with hype. You're obliged to pick a new fancy tech or you will be blamed in backwardness and people won't be interested in what you're building. But what is more important: the tools you're using or a product that you make?

Bureaucratic API design...

Our software is used in 90 countries (last time I looked). Of course, being somewhat overly pedantic and in wish of control, I built our webshop. In Javascript. Then in Elm. Then in Javascript again. Oh, well. Anyway, regarding the VAT. EU, in an effort to get a piece of

Monaco

Embedding Monaco Editor into a Web Application

Today, if you want to include a code editing features into your saas project, you don't have many alternatives other than the Monaco editor, a browser-based version of the popular Visual Studio Code editor.

Testing

Build It Up, Test It Down

Setting priorities is important and inevitable part of a software development process. Balancing development speed and quality is one of the basic compromises that a programmer should make.

Vue

Investigating Memory Leaks in Vue Applications With Chrome Memory Tools

When you build a complex Vue application consisting of many views with deeply nested components hierarchy, very soon you will encounter memory issues.

QA

End-to-End Web Application Testing with New TestCafe Studio

A recent beta release of the DevExpress' TestCafe Studio brought us a good opportunity to implement end-to-end testing for our new SQL Studio application. I will explain why TestCafe Studio is a good tool to quickly automate QA for any web site or application and why we end up using

Managing cloud infrastructure

We are building our upcoming online database manager SQL Studio SQL App on cloud infrastructure. Currently we use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as primary cloud provider and plan to expand to Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Pulumi proved to be invaluable to us. It is a platform for cloud

Vue

How to Integrate External DOM-dependent Libraries Into a Vue Application

Integrating 3rd party libraries into a Vue application is not harder than in any other JavaScript reactive framework. Nothing special with using a single import statement. Integrating a component that depends on DOM and renders itself on a page is a different story. Examples are maps, editors, image manipulation tools

Persistent workspace in SQL Studio

When Sublime Text showed up, it was a breath of a fresh air with some unique concepts. Two concepts were game changers for me: persistent workspacesinstant fuzzy searchPersistent workspaces meant that you could have saved the editor without being prompted to save your files. Next time you launched it, it

A database with a view

Many relational database engines support views. Views can act as a kind of virtual tables and using them can sometimes greatly improve the architecture and the testability of the system, but of course, there might be the price to pay. Common simple calculations You might encounter a situation when the

Security concerns for the cloud infrastructure

There is an all-around push to the cloud due to massive simplification of resource management. If done well, it leads to massive costs savings as well. There are many concerns of the security and unforeseen weaknesses of the cloud application deployment - not to mention cloud database deployment where data

SPA

Balancing Responsiveness and State Consistency in SPA

One of the interesting technical challenges to solve when building a modern web application is to achieve acceptable responsiveness for a UI depending on sometimes sluggish API endpoints. User's perception of an application as slow is all about latency, reactions, wait times and feedback. Delays, freezes, feedback lags, unresponsiveness — all

cloud

Reliability concerns for cloud databases

More and more businesses are moving their infrastructure to the cloud. It makes a lot of sense, since on-premise infrastructure is often underutilized, maintenance is a hassle and there are many ways for things to go wrong. Typically, even if backups are regularly made, companies almost never have a regularly

A Case for ORM, a Case Against ORM

What Is ORMORM stands for Object-Relational Mapping and it can be simply described as mapping of classes (objects) to database tables. The concept is almost as old as object-oriented programming itself. It's hard to find which library was exactly first, but some suggest that it was TOPLink for Smalltalk. Today

C#

Improve autocomplete performance with custom binary serialization

Using BinaryReader and BinaryWriter for fast custom de/serialization of C# objects

autocomplete

Autocomplete response time under 100ms in the cloud

A significant part of the perceived quality of the applications we use is responsiveness. Sadly, even for a desktop software, it's a frequent event of UI locking up while certain tasks are completed. Bad news: our CPUs aren't becoming significantly faster for a single-thread tasks (I fondly remember days when

database normalization

Database normalization

What Is Database Normalization? Normalization is a multi-step process used to organize a relational database into tables and columns and to: Eliminate redundant (useless) data.Ensure data dependencies make senseEliminate undesirable characteristics like insertion, update and deletion anomaliesWhy would you want to normalize your database? The purpose of normalization is

Hot Keys and UX of Web Applications

When at the beginning of my professional career I meet first true professionals, one thing that I'd noticed was how effective they were with the tools they used. They extensively used hotkeys and different sorts of keyboard shortcuts to quickly craft things they want. Opposite, as a novice user from

Autocomplete in SQL Studio

I have wished for powerful and instant autocomplete in SQL editors for a long time. It never came - autocomplete in all database managers is pretty basic. Let's see what we have prepared in SQL Studio. We are offering table autocomplete in the FROM clause - standard. However, we made

Database tools I want

When thinking of a modern development pipeline, I always find database development tooling undeveloped in comparison to what code development tools are offering. We have version control systems, review tools, CI/CD solutions, linters and many more. There are plenty of them so you can automate workflow as you want

State of database management tools

Database managers seem to be more or less the same for the past 20 years. They differ in functionality and features, but see one and you've seen them all.

About us

Let me introduce ourselves and the products we are working on. Blogging has been on my mind for a decade, but I never could really get it started. No more!