Robert Gravelle

There was a time not so long ago when the word “hacking” conjured up the image of fifteen-year-old writing viruses that presented a message like “You’ve been hacked by badboy45”.  If the individual was particularly malicious, they might go so far as to reformat your C drive.  The recent Sony Pictures hacking incident marked a […]

In my An Overview of the MySQL Performance Schema article, I talked about a relatively new tool called the Performance Schema.  Initially implemented in MySQL 5.5 and further improved for MySQL 5.6, the Performance Schema is a tool for monitoring MySQL Server execution at a low level while having minimal impact on server performance.   The […]

Not long after writing my Understanding the MySQL Information Schema Database article I realized that the title is just a little misleading.   In MySQL, a schema and database are synonymous, so the phrasing of both “Schema” and “Database” is redundant.  Lesson learned! In today’s follow-up article, we’ll be exploring the information Schema’s counterpart, the Performance […]

A reality of the modern world is that people need to have the ability to access their data at a moment’s notice.   Gone are the days that a Database Administrator (DBA) spent his or her time between a desktop workstation and database server(s).  Today, the typical DBA is responsible for one or more production databases […]

Welcome to the second installment in a series on MySQL Gotchas. Part one addressed the MySQL Numeric Overflow Gotcha. Today’s article will explore the perils of working with dates in MySQL. Gotchas for the Uninitiated People are not always clear on the difference between a gotcha and a bug. A bug is a flaw in […]

When What You See Is Not What You Get “If it’s not supported, do the next best thing. Silently.” – MySQL design philosophy Anyone who has some experience in IT knows that all operating systems, programming languages, and software products come with their own set of idiosyncrasies.  Some optimists like to refer to these as […]

As more and more companies look to the cloud for their data storage needs, the same questions are being asked over and over again: if a security breech were to occur, who would be responsible and how much of a guarantee could the provider give us that our data would be safe from prying eyes. […]

My most recent articles, Importing XML Data into MySQL Tables Using a Stored Procedure and Enhance Your MySQL XML Import Procedures using Prepared Statements, explored how capable stored procedures were in importing XML-formatted data. At the end of those articles, I concluded that as a DIY solution, stored procs are indeed a viable option. For […]

For the past few years, data centers have been gradually replacing their hard drives with faster flash storage. Meanwhile, database storage engines such as MyISAM and InnoDB continue to use forty-year old indexing algorithms for managing read and write operations. Tokutek has developed a new kind of data structure called a Fractal Tree that is […]

Denormalized (sung to the tune of Dehumanized by Symphony X) It’s denormalized Don’t you realize It’s denormalized And optimized You forbade me You got angry Denormalized! Normalization is the process of applying a series of rules to ensure that your database achieves optimal structure. Each normal form is a progression of these rules as successive […]

If your MySQL database interfaces with applications or is used to generate reports then chances are good that it contains some massive stored procedures, just brimming with intensive logic and calculation code.  In that case, you had better set up some type of unit testing framework so that you can verify that your SQL code […]

MySQL is a bit of a strange animal in terms of scheduled task processing.  While it did introduce its own brand of job scheduling called Events in version 5.1, some Database Administrators (DBAs) feel that it isn’t quite ready for prime time where robustness and error handling are concerned.  For those reasons, scripting languages like […]