Archive for the ‘Databases’ Category

JDK upgrades…and the aftermath

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

We have a long-time client that has been running in JDK 1.3 since the enterprise app was written and I was wanting to have the benefits of the newer versions of Java both in terms of language features and runtime speed improvements.  So I upgraded the app to JDK 6 (aka 1.6) last week when [...]

Amazon’s MySQL in the Cloud

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

In the next installment in its series of cloud computing infrastructure offerings, Amazon announced Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a cloud version of the popular MySQL database. Following the popular “pay-per-drink” model of EC2 and S3 for selling compute, storage and database access, Amazon RDS gives you a MySQL database that you can spin [...]

MariaDB, a MySQL Fork, and ODA

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009

There’s a group that is trying to form a community hub for MySQL (probably defensively given Oracle’s acquisition of Sun). The key figure is one of the original authors of MySQL (Monty Widenius)

According to a statement from the Open Database Alliance (ODA), the consortium will act as a hub for MySQL and its derivative code, [...]

Tech News Highlights: May

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

For those whose interests bend more toward web application development, some recent movements in the industry.

MySQL + Oracle = ?
MySQL, the open source database used by a huge number of websites (including ones we’ve developed) is now owned by database industry gorilla Oracle as a result of Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems. Sun bought [...]

(Microsoft) Access for the Web?

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Anybody who has ever used Microsoft Access knows that it’s a very high leverage tool. In a short while you can get basic database functionality, forms and reports up and running quickly. It certainly has its limitations but in some instances it’s just the right solution.

With that background, this post was pretty interesting to skim.  [...]

Will Oracle let MySQL keep its new enterprise chops?

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

One person’s take on what’s going to happen to MySQL under its new ownership.

Summary: Oracle owns InnoDB technology and will position MySQL to be limited to “Web database” (versus for enterprise software like Oracle’s Applications offering?) and perhaps limit its scalability.

This may be an issue for some larger users, but for many it will probably [...]

MySQL Spatial Extensions

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

I was looking for some way to do proximity searches for a client and came across these features in MySQL 5.x and higher:

MySQL Spatial Extensions

The extensions allow indexing of geospatial data so that you can quickly evaluate relationships between geometries.  Currently, the only completely implemented functions are the Minimal Bounding Rectangles (MBR) functions. So, for [...]

JOINs in UPDATE statements, Awesome!

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

Another post for the developers.

This whole post may be a result of me learning to write SQL queries in Oracle. But I found yesterday that in MySQL you can write an UPDATE statement that includes a JOIN. This was always off limits in Oracle. This means that you can update two tables [...]

TOAD for MySQL – Yes!!

Friday, October 10th, 2008

It exists. I installed it and I’m never going back. (Well, until they charge for it.)

It lives here

Why?s my ?text? look like this??: MySQL and Character Encodings

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Have you ever seen funny characters showing on-screen?

Users copying from Word and pasting their curly quotes, em-dashes, and accented characters into your text fields?

There are a number of settings that need to be in place in order to guarantee that extended character set characters that get input [...]