(Rob Young) One of the biggest problems I faced as a field DBA was defending my production databases against poorly performing SQL code. Talking to folks at the MySQL UC, during customer visits and trolling the MySQL forums/blogs confirms that this is a common problem and even more challenging when

(Robin Schumacher) I still remember the day. I was working for a large systems integrator on a very major account, and had responsibility for some DB2 databases, but also had the unfortunate duty of also taking care of some legacy IMS databases (hierarchical IBM databases used quite a lot back in th

(Jonathan) I had this relatively simple idea of storing conditions in the database. The idea is to store the condition of the if-then-else from your code in the database. While this will add (slightly) more space to the database, I hope that it will do away with processing the data over and over aga

(Baron Schwartz) Yesterday I helped someone who was seeing a lot of “server has gone away” error messages on his website. While investigating this problem, I noticed several things amiss, which appeared to be related but really weren’t.

(Mats Kindahl) Protobuf comes with a minor problem: it does not have support for handling “type tagged structures”, that is, something reminiscent of objects in OOP lingo, so if one is going to have a heterogeneous sequences of messages, you have to roll it yourself. For that reason, I added a trans

(Peter Zaitsev) After my previous post there were questions raised about Index Merge on Multiple Indexes vs Two Column Index efficiency. I mentioned in most cases when query can use both of the ways using multiple column index would be faster but I also went ahead to do some benchmarks today.

(Mats Kindahl) I started playing around with protobuf when doing some stuff in Drizzle (more about that later), and since the examples where using IOStream, the table reader and writer that Brian wrote is using IOStreams. Now, IOStreams is pretty powerful, but it can be a pain to use, so of course I

(Stefan Esser) While SQL-Injection is one of the most discussed security problems in web applications other possible problems for SQL queries like overlong input are usually ignored although they can lead to all kinds of security problems.

(Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) One of the things we love most about PostgreSQL is the ease with which one can define new aggregate functions with even a language as succinct as SQL. Normally when we have needed a median function, we’ve just used the built-in median function in PL/R as we briefly demonstra

(Sheeri Cabral) In two words: online operations. In a paragraph: Forget partitioning, row-based replication and events. The big reasons most people are going to salivate over 5.1, and probably start plans to upgrade now, are the online operations: