A hub for sharing relational database knowledge and experimentation
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
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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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Alright, so I’m playing around with something. I’ve developed a bit of a TikTok addiction after exploring the platform to connect with my 14-year-old. One of the post types I’ve enjoyed is the “Roll for ______” type, where the content creator uses dice typical to Dungeons and Dragons to choose combinations of things that are sometimes magical, sometimes ridiculous, and occasionally disgusting.… Read the rest
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Every RDBMS has areas where the differences from other RDBMSes are noticeable, and this is one of them between Db2 and MySQL. Most RDBMSes have quirks to the way SQL is written, and this is certainly true of Db2 where some things were there before the SQL-92 standard or other standards existed.… Read the rest
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One of the things that learning a new platform (MySQL) has taught me is just how critical the most basic topics are, so I thought I’d do an overview of how to get data out of a Db2 (on Linux, Unix, or Windows) database.… 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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I’ve been spending some time working with indexes as I learn MySQL, and there were a few things I thought were were worth mentioning. As always, I’m writing from my own knowledge with deep experience in IBM DB2, and as a learner when it comes to MySQL.… Read the rest
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I’ve spent some time understanding how MySQL structures tables and indexes, and wanted to share what I’ve learned. This is not the structure as created in the CREATE TABLE or CREATE INDEX statements, but how that data is generally structured on disk, both logically and physically.… Read the rest