A hub for sharing relational database knowledge and experimentation
There is a part of me that just wants to spill everything about my job search in blog entries and LinkedIn posts. Some of this would be valuable information for readers, and it would certainly be cathartic for me. However, I don’t think it would be in my best interest when negotiating with potential employers.… Read the rest
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With a year of fairly extensive MySQL experience under my belt, and uncertainty as to which exciting direction my career will take me next, I wanted to take a moment to write about some of the differences between Db2 and MySQL at a fairly high level.… Read the rest
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Database performance is heavily influenced by data volume and cardinality (or how unique that data may be).
It’s interesting to watch the look on someone’s face when this concept clicks. There is a look of understanding from a developer when she can extrapolate why SQL ran in seconds on a small, local, dockerized, database but the same SQL runs in minutes in a much larger QA environment.… Read the rest
Continue reading »It’s amazing that I’ve had a 22-year career in tech, and until last week, I had never been laid off. Last week, I was a victim of the 20% layoffs at Shopify. Along with me came very talented people with years of experience there.… Read the rest
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My article on DB2 Basics: Quotation Marks has 962 views so far this year, so I thought it might be time to write a similar article on using quotation marks with MySQL.
For the most part, you can use single and double quotation marks interchangeably in MySQL as long as you maintain consistency.… Read the rest
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“Relational databases don’t scale!”. This is the claim that database experts have heard over and over again, and yet we spend our careers scaling databases. I immediately translate this in my head to either “I threw hardware at the problem and it didn’t work!”… Read the rest
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About 18 months ago, I decided that it was time to look for my next job. I had only been at my employer at the time for about 2 years, and had helped them through a couple of tough things they had hired me for.… Read the rest
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I’m going to walk through the basic creation of auto-incrementing integer columns in MySQL and Db2 and point out some differences and similarities.
Every relational database I have worked with has had a functionality for generating column values. The most basic generation is an incrementing integer.… Read the rest
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When I started working as a DBA in 2001, the relational database management system choices were more limited and the choice itself was often left up to a system architect. Rarely did developers have a say, and even DBAs only had a say in whether they could support it or would have to hire people to support it.… Read the rest
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This is one area that was not a surprise to me coming from Db2 to MySQL, as I’ve had to deal with people confused in the other direction for years. Essentially, MySQL allows a syntax for GROUP BY that Db2 and most RDBMSes do not allow.… Read the rest
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Working in technology, I’ve heard a number of things about ChatGPT from various news sources.
I was particularly interested hearing some teachers saying it was the end of being able to properly detect students cheating when writing papers. Then I heard a teacher talking about how this was the new ‘calculator’ that teachers need to learn how to leverage in their curriculums.… Read the rest
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The goal of this article is to to take one query and use the explain facilities of Db2 to walk through it, and then do the same with MySQL, and then show some of the optimizations I might make for the query and why.… Read the rest
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