• Memcached Favored Over SQL For Airbnb
    [April 23, 2013] Airbnb recently shared an engineer Q&A talking about building its Airbnb Neighborhoods feature. Here’s a look at the feature if you’re unfamiliar:
  • Three New SQL Server Tools Launched By Idera
    [February 19, 2013] Idera announced the availability of three new free tools for SQL Server DBAs and IT administrators: Server Backup Free, SQL Backup Status Reporter and SQL Permissions Extractor Free.
  • Cloud SQL Gets Improvements From Google, Trail Offered
    [November 14, 2012] Google announced some updates to Google Cloud SQL, which will enable users to work with bigger and faster MySQL databases.
  • Windows Azure SQL Database Updated
    [October 2, 2012] Microsoft has been very aggressive over the past year with its Windows Azure service. The cloud computing platform has been positioned as a worthy competitor to Google's App Engine service, and Microsoft continually provides new updates to it. The latest update brings a number of new features to the SQL database.
  • Perspective From Programming Languages – SQL vs. NoSQL
    [July 18, 2012] The SQL vs. NoSQL debate is quickly becoming a rite of passage for database administrators and geeks alike. Jeff Cogswell recently contributed some fuel to the fire over at Slashdot. Although the commentors on the article focused on the short points in Cogswell's summary of the SQL vs NoSQL debate, the article itself attempts to focus on how programming language implementations for both SQL and NoSQL databases stack up against each other. Unfortunately, Mr. Cogswell's attempt to view the debate from the lens of programming language libraries and programming paradigms is a ridiculous straw man fallacy.
  • Windows Azure SQL Reporting: It’s Alive!
    [June 19, 2012] Though SQL Azure Reporting Services was announced in the fall of 2010, the service has, until last week, been available only to testers. As Mary Jo Foley announced in her ZDNet article, The general public will now have access to the suite of tools, including the Business Intelligence Development Studio and SQL Server Data Tools. The tools work the same way as the SQL Server Reporting works on Windows Server, exporting reports to Excel, Word, HTML, PDF, XML, and CSV formats.
  • Is there a place for MySQL in the future?
    [June 1, 2012] Matt Asay believes so. In his column on The Register, Asay acknowledges the presence and impressive growth of NoSQL. "With the NoSQL market emerging at an 82 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) it's looking like MySQL may get bulldozed by its NoSQL peers." Disheartening though that may be, Asay is quick to point out that research shows that the MySQL market will be at $664m by 2015 "growing at a healthy 40% CAGR". With a claimed 900 paying customers, according to NoSQL vendors and assuming 25% are replacing MySQL that represents only 0.002% of the total estimated MySQL base and 1.5% of MySQL paying customers.
  • Using INTO OUTFILE from a Remote Client
    [April 27, 2012] An often useful query in SQL is SELECT ... INTO. With SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE, results can be directly placed in a file as comma separated values. Once in the common CSV format, your results can be pulled into other scripts or used as backups (although the latter is not the ideal implementation for backing up). For example:
  • Understanding NoSQL And Its Uses
    [March 20, 2012] In college I took a lot of database classes. Relational database design, Advanced database applications relating to RDBMSes, SQL, and PL/SQL. By the time I was done, I thought I was ready. Two months later my boss tells me, "SQL is the past, NoSQL is the FUTURE!" Are you kidding me? So my college credits were for...what exactly? More than that, what is NoSQL? Why is it better or worse than SQL? Without realizing it, I had undertaken a quest. NoSQL was my enemy, the enemy of my knowledge. And to defeat your enemy, you must understand it.
  • NoSQL Job Trends ? February 2012
    [February 28, 2012] Continuing the February job trends here is another installment. Today, we are looking at NoSQL job trends. I am continuing to focus the list of NoSQL offerings on the same 9 tools. So, the list includes Cassandra, Redis, Voldemort, SimpleDB, CouchDB, MongoDB, HBase, Hypertable and Riak. As was stated previously, Hadoop continues to be the clear leader in demand and tends to flattens the trends of other solutions. I am watching the trend to see if the other tools are close enough to make the graphs useful, but at this point, Hadoop is not included.
  • Microsoft to Release Newest Iteration of SQL Server
    [February 7, 2012] From it's initial release in 1989 SQL Server has been updated and released 13 times and the 14th release is right around the corner.
  • MySQL and CakePHP: A Match Made in Heaven
    [January 18, 2012] CakePHP is a PHP framework that is become more and more popular because it is so easy to use and makes that task of building web applications a much less daunting task.
  • The 80/20 SQL and NoSQL Paradigm
    [December 14, 2011] I'm not ashamed to admit that I've seen Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married... more than once. I've even seen the sequel. Okay, maybe I'm a little ashamed. Can I blame my wife? Well, when life hands you romantic comedies, make lemonade - with plenty of alcohol. Also, use it to make good analogies to support your technical stance on why you shouldn't be in any hurry to implement that latest NoSQL technology.
  • Optimizing MySQL Part 2: Optimize Tables
    [November 17, 2011] As your databases get larger and larger and you continually make changes to them, they will get messy and fragmented, just like any data on your computer.
  • Optimizing MySQL – Part 1: Indexing
    [October 25, 2011] With all of its stability, complexity, and support options, MySQL can be slow sometimes.
  • The Steady Rise Of NoSQL
    [October 4, 2011] Now that it is clear that Oracle is serious about offering NoSQL functionality for their systems, the movement may really come to the forefront of the development world.
  • Nokia has Trouble with SQL Injections
    [September 2, 2011] It seems that even companies that have money for brilliant security measures, are still vulnerable to attack.
  • An Overview of Transactions
    [August 19, 2011] Databases are becoming more complex and as this evolution is taking place there is much discussion about SQL and noSQL, ACID and BASE, and almost everything else related to databases. Central to this debate and commonly misunderstood are transactions.
  • MySQL Runs the Web
    [July 26, 2011] Not only is the LAMP software stack the most common web implementation, but MySQL is also built into the leading CMS engines: WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, and others. It is used by the largest websites in the world: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr. When looking at database architectures, SQL is here to stay, and of them MySQL will continue to run the web.
  • Facebook On The Brink Of SQL Crisis?
    [July 14, 2011] Facebook may on the brink of a crisis and trapped in a MySQL "Fate Worse than Death." The entire social platform is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation that stands to cripple the social giant. According to Micahel Stonebraker the only possibility is to rewrite everything from scratch.
  • MongoDB’s Growth Into The Enterprise
    [June 28, 2011] NoSQL is still not well understood, as a term or a database market category, by enterprise IT decision makers. However, one NoSQL vendor, 10gen, creators of open source MongoDB, appears to be growing into enterprise accounts and distancing themselves from competitors. If you're considering, or curious about, NoSQL databases, spend some time looking at MongoDB.
  • CUBRID Is Having A Programming Contest
    [June 7, 2011] CUBRID is having a programming contest! I like programming contests that almost anyone can enter, and this one is interesting for a different reason than some others. For those who do not know, CUBRID is:
  • Comodo Brazil Breach Reminds Admins to Guard Against SQL Injection
    [May 27, 2011] Back in March 2011, the Italian reseller of trusted, authorized, security certicates, Comodo was compromised through a simple SQL injection attack. The relevation that such a visable figure in online security could be breached with a simple SQL injection attack prompted SQL injection attempts at other Comodo resellers around the world. The latest to fall victim was Comodo Brazil. Both of these attacks involved a security auditting tool, sqlmap, Python script; and similar SQL injection points can be found by searching Google for script filetypes and generic paramaters names. A simple attack on a significant authority figure should give database administrators more to consider when securing their servers.
  • Advanced MySQL in PHP
    [May 5, 2011] Let's face it, we all know the basics of connecting to a MySQL database in PHP. That's development 101. But how many times have you looked at your code and wondered "there must be a better way to do this" to yourself? These are a couple PHP functions that I have found to be indispensable as my career as a web developer have progressed.
  • Oracle Updates SQL Developer
    [April 22, 2011] The graphical interface for SQL developers has been updated by Oracle, and the new version promises increased functionality and productivity, while simplifying various developmental processes. The third version of Oracle's SQL Developer looks to be the most comprehensive of the release family, as Oracle's update is a response to user feedback.