A Byte of Coding Issue 374

Yo,

Another day, another issue.

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Finding Needles in a Haystack with Best-of-K

Published: 25 March 2024

Tags: distributed systems, algorithms

Marc Brooker explores how the best-of-k algorithm performs in load balancing a distributed system.

Some highlights:

• best-of-k algorithm can be described as “we pick k of the n workers, and send the request to the least loaded of those k”

• uses simulations to back up theory

• best-of-k performs poorly on systems that have a lower max capacity per worker

Pagination and ordering by large values

Published: 25 March 2024

Tags: sql server, database, optimization

Aaron Bertrand dives into how to best do pagination in a database when you’re ordering by values that are too large to fit in an index key.

Some highlights:

• one approach can be to create a computed column that is derived from the larger column, but limited to a smaller size

• any value over 1,700 bytes can’t be indexed

• alternative solutions for when you can’t modify the schema are also presented

Single Sign-On: Acronyms Demystified

Published: 1 June 2023

Tags: sponsored, auth

WorkOS describes the meaning of and provides additional resources (for further reading) for OAuth, OIDC, and SAML.

Some highlights:

• “OAuth is not an authentication protocol”

• OIDC is built on top of OAuth

• SAML is used for federated authentication

Testing Patterns

Published: 22 March 2024

Tags: php, testing

Brent Roose describes his thought process when setting up a maintainable system that required a lot of tests for a php syntax highlighting project.

Some highlights:

• uses a data-as-code approach

• tests are dynamically generated

• one downside is that you can’t run a specific test without first running the whole test suite