(Greg Sabino Mullane) This is the first in an occasional series of articles about configuring PostgreSQL. The main way to do this, of course, is the postgresql.conf file, which is read by the Postgres daemon on startup and contains a large number of parameters that affect the database’s performance

(Rob Gravelle) When joining tables on common fields, if you’re not diligent in the use of AND-OR combinations in the criteria clause, be prepared for unexpected results! Learn how to break filtering criteria into individual steps and how to group AND-OR statements to most effectively isolate the dat

(James Cohen) As we’ve seen already column size is important for indexes. Cardinality is really important too, it’s the uniqueness of the values included in the index.

(Mark Leith) Internally MySQL uses various methods to manage (or, block) concurrent access to shared structures within the server – the most common being mutexes (or Mutual Exclusion locks), RW Locks, or Semaphores. Each have slightly different properties on how different threads are allowed to inte

(Peter Zaitsev) I wrote couple of weeks ago on dangers of bad cache design. Today I’ve been troubleshooting the production down case which had fair amount of issues related to how cache was used.

(Joshua Tolley) With the release of PostgreSQL 9.0 comes the ability to execute “anonymous code blocks” in various of the PostgreSQL procedural languages. The idea stemmed from work back in autumn of 2009 that tried to respond to a common question on IRC or the mailing lists: how do I grant a permis

(Gerry Narvaja) While working on a deployment we came across a nasty surprise. In hindsight it was avoidable, but it never crossed our minds it could happen. I’ll share the experience so when you face a similar situation, you’ll know what to expect.

(Mats Kindahl) I recently started looking over how to get information about relay log file and binary log file using an SQL interface. Being able to do that can be quite handy when one is going to work with replication in various ways. In my particular case, I wanted to get the path to the relay log

(Rob Gravelle) To minimize headaches that can accompany long field lists, DBAs employ a range of techniques. The specific techniques covered today are used to disambiguate between duplicate column names. Don’t be too quick to judge this as basic stuff. You just might find that there are a few things

(James Cohen) We all know that it’s good practice for queries to use indexes but it’s not that clear-cut, there are good indexes and poor indexes. By making indexes more efficient you stand to increase query speeds and the places that MySQL can use the indexes effectively.