Robert Gravelle

Welcome to the second installment in the Database Buyer’s Guide series. The purpose of this guide is to help you whittle down the extensive and potentially overwhelming array of Database Management Software (DBMS) products and services to a short list for further consideration.  In Part one, we began by exploring the major database types and […]

Just when you thought that you understood the term Web 2.0, along comes this Cloud thing. Do you know what that’s all about? Do you care? What does that have to do with your MySQL database? Let me try to help you answer these questions. SaaS’s little brother has arrived and his name is DBaaS. […]

Don’t get me wrong; the LIKE operator is great for finding words or phrases within strings. I’ve used it for those times that you need to match complex string patterns in MySQL. But you’ll be happy to learn that it provides a form of advanced pattern matching that is based on extended regular expressions used […]

There are many times as a database developer and administrator that you’ll want to know what entities are being excluded from a straight table join. For instance, it would be instructive for management to identify sales people who haven’t received any bonuses, as these might be deemed to be the underperformers. To provide the requestor […]

The number of data management products available today is truly staggering. Never have there been so many choices. Besides the traditional commercial relational databases, there are a number of great open source products to choose from, as well as a whole other world of cloud and NoSQL databases to consider. With so many options, what’s […]

All of the larger systems that I’ve helped develop necessitated storing some combination of date and time fields. Almost universally, these fields presented difficulties of some kind or another. One particularly memorable challenge was converting between internal storage and display formats that featured the month name rather than a numeric one. We were able to […]

MySQL’s Explain Extended Explained   One nice feature added to the EXPLAIN statement in MySQL 4.1 is the EXTENDED keyword which provides you with some helpful additional information on query optimization. It should be used together with SHOW WARNINGS to get information about how query looks after transformation as well as what other notes the […]

Using MySQL analysis tools, you can identify and optimize slow queries in order to eliminate the bottlenecks that they cause. Rob Gravelle examines the Slow Query Log and Explain command, which can both help identify slow queries. When you consider the mind-numbing amount of data that is being accessed every day by people around the […]

Rob Gravelle lists his top 10 MySQL best practices for database administrators, architects, developers, and security personnel. Many groups and individuals are involved in the field of data management, from MySQL administrators, architects, developers, as well as infrastructure support people. Each of these plays a part in the security, maintenance, and performance of a MySQL […]

When someone mentions the term “reusable query”, the first thought that comes to mind is usually stored procedures.  While they are an integral part of writing reusable code, they are only one ingredient in a bigger pie.   Other key players include views and native as well as user-defined functions.   This article will explain how all […]

In the Web 2.0 world where smart phone and Web applications are competing to access terabytes of data, there is a new imperative for speeding up retrieval times as much as the technology permits. Rob Gravelle lists a few coding techniques that we as database administrators and developers can use to whittle down unwieldy results […]

A poorly optimized query can become the bottleneck in an otherwise highly optimized process. In many cases, the source of the slow performance is improper table joining in the WHERE clause. With that in mind, this article looks at ways to optimize table joins for speedy data retrieval. Novice query writers are quite content once […]