The most useful feature of the relational database is that it allows us to easily process data in sets, which can be much faster than processing it serially. When the relational database was first implemented, write-ahead-logging and other technologies did not exist. This made it difficult to implement the database in a way that matched [...]
Caching could be the last thing you want to do
I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected. What is that mistake? The ecommerce package I was working with depended on caching. Out of the box it couldn’t serve 10 pages/second unless I [...]
Working with large data sets in MySQL
What does working with large data sets in mySQL teach you ? Of course you have to learn a lot about query optimization, art of building summary tables and tricks of executing queries exactly as you want. I already wrote about development and configuration side of the problem so I will not go to details [...]
Top 5 Wishes for MySQL
About a week ago Marten send me email pointing to his article published on Jays Blog (Come on Marten, it is time for you to get your own blog). I should have replied much earlier but only found time to do that now. So here is my list 1. Be Pluggable Unlike many OpenSource projects [...]
MySQL Consulting – Being on your own
About half a year have passed since me and Vadim have left MySQL to do MySQL Consulting on our own. Bunch of people have been wondering about our experiences so I thought it would be worth to share it here.
Slow Query Log analyzes tools
MySQL has simple but quite handy feature – slow query log, which allows you to log all queries which took over define number of seconds to execute. There is also an option to enable logging queries which do not use indexes even if they take less time (–log-queries-not-using-indexes) Slow query log is great to spot [...]

