An East Coast option

Within the present MySQL ecosystem, there are limited options for dedicated MySQL Consulting in the US. Outside of the official Sun/MySQL Consulting , Percona and Proven Scaling both based in Silicon valley are the only options generally known and accepted by the MySQL Community.

Read more

Your data and the cloud

I will be speaking on July 29th in New York at an Entrepreneurs Forum on A Free Panel on Cloud Computing . With a number of experts including Hank Williams of KloudShare, Mike Nolet of AppNexus, and Hans Zaunere of New York PHP fame is should be a great event.

Read more

When (n) counts?

I have seen on many engagements the column data type is defined as INT(1). People have the misconception that this numeric integer data type is of the length of one digit, or one byte.

Read more

The minimum testing for a shared disk MySQL environment

Recently I was asked to provide guidelines for testing fail over of a MySQL configuration that was provided by a hosting provider. The first observation was the client didn’t have any technical details from the hosting provider of what the moving parts were, and also didn’t have any confirmation other then I think a verbal confirmation that it had been testing.

Read more

BIGINT v INT. Is there a big deal?

The answer is yes. In this face off we have two numeric MySQL data types, both Integer. In fact MySQL has 9 different numeric data types for integer, fixed precision and floating point numbers, however we are just going to focus on two, BIGINT and INT.

Read more

Off to OSCON

I will be heading to my first OSCON next week where I will be presenting MySQL Proxy: from Architecture to Implementation in conjunction with Giuseppe Maxia . As was written by Colin Charles Our booth is yours… Sun at OSCON , Sun/MySQL would appear to also have a reasonable turnout.

Read more

Why SQL_MODE is important? Part I

MySQL pre version 5.0 was very lax in it’s management of valid data. It was easy for data integrity to be abused if you knew how. The most common examples were truncations and silent conversions that if not understood could provide a serious data integrity issue.

Read more

Sun Stock Prices

Sun Microsystem’s (NASDAQ:JAVA ) hit a low this week of $8.71. There was a stronger rally and a close at $9.16 today. The financial times reports Sun Micro chief sees rays of hope , and Bloomberg Sun Rises After Fourth-Quarter Profit Tops Estimates .

Read more

A Bill Gates bio

In the recent Wired magazine (yes, the paper one), there was an interesting time line of Bill Gates. It was rather an odd format, but I found the two page spread an enjoyable read.

Read more

Auditing your MySQL Data – Part 2

Continuing from my earlier post Auditing your MySQL Data , Roland has accurately highlighted that my initial post leaves out some important information for auditing. As the original charter was only to keep a history, for the purpose of comparing certain columns, a history was all that was needed.

Read more

Auditing your MySQL Data

I was asked recently by a client to help with providing a history of data in certain tables. Like most problems, there is no one single solution, and in this case there are several possible solutions.

Read more

Focus on what you do best

When you have a great idea for a web application, it can be hard to consider with all the moving parts to focus just on what’s your uniqueness or differentiator from everybody else.

Read more

Getting Started with Simple DB

With my continued investigation of evaluating alternative data management with cloud computing options, I’m now evaluating Amazon Simple DB . Still in restricted beta, it helps to have a friend on the inside.

Read more

Do you store credit cards in your MySQL Database?

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) has been developed to help organizations that process card payments to prevent credit card fraud, cracking and various other security vulnerabilities and threats.

Read more