One of the things that fascinates me about SQL is the extreme limits on reserved words, especially when compared with most procedural languages. I’ve written about using reserved words for IBM Db2 and MySQL. I thought I’d explore the issue…
I have answered this question so many times and in so many different ways. Conceptually, my article Db2 Basics: The Role of Databases covers the concept of a database or database management system, why we need them and how we…
Every database platform has a way to select from nothing. Sometimes we use it to generate data manually, sometimes we use it to get values of various system functions, but it is important to be able to do. Dummy Table…
There are many ways to scale databases. One I was less familiar with before my last job is application-level sharding. While there are tools that work on some platforms to help you achieve application-level sharding (like Vitess with MySQL), the…
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…
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. General quotation marks For the most part, you…
“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…
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…
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. Functionality Every relational database I have worked with has had a functionality for generating column values. The…
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…
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…
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…
