If your answer was Binary Large Object, then you would be wrong. Check out Mike’s comments on History of Database Blobs from the man that created the BLOB, Mr Jim Starkey.
I had the chance to meet Jim a few months ago, and I spent quite some time talking on various database topics. He is one cool guy.
Clean data is one of those terms everyone uses and few define precisely. Row counts match? No nulls in key columns? Values within expected ranges? All useful checks — and all insufficient once you move from a table view to a visualization view.
Read moreSynthetic benchmarks have their place, but I have always preferred working with real data. Not client production data — that stays private — but publicly available datasets that reflect the messy shapes, skewed distributions, and indexing challenges you encounter in the wild.
Read moreI recently had the pleasure of presenting Planning your upgrade to MySQL 9.7 at COSCUP 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan. COSCUP (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters) is one of the largest open source conferences in Asia, and the community there is always engaged and technically sharp.
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