Robert Gravelle

Knowing how to use temporary tables in your stored procedures is a great way to save time and effort, particularly when dealing with multiple queries that return very large and/or similar resultsets. If you’re fetching several resultsets that contain a lot of common data, it can make sense to obtain a single resultset that has […]

Indexes are a feature that you can enable on your MySQL tables to increase performance, but they do have some downsides. When you create a new index, MySQL builds a separate block of information that needs to be updated every time there are changes made to the table. This means that if you are constantly […]

When I first took on the role of reports designer for our systems, my first instinct was to try fetching all of the required fields in one huge SQL statement. I soon learned that there are better and easier ways to structure a query that will minimize the complexity while raising our confidence in the […]

Normalization is almost universally applied to relational databases such as MySQL in order to optimize tables for general-purpose querying and to rid them of certain undesirable characteristics that could lead to a loss of data integrity. Doing so tends to promote better accuracy of queries, but it also leads to queries that take a little […]

Anyone who has spent a fair amount of time working with databases comes to realize that common tasks like backups and data transfers should be run from a script rather than interactively. Having MySQL read commands from a file is called running in batch mode, because such a file generally contains multiple commands that all […]

HeidiSQL 4’s Stored Routine Editor offers a user-friendly alternative to using a command-line interface to create and manage your stored procedures and functions. In the last article, we covered how to write a stored procedure using the Stored Routine Editor. Today, we’ll be learning how to take advantage of some useful native MySQL functions as […]

In the ”Write MySQL Queries Using HeidiSQL 4” article, we learned how to connect to a MySQL database and execute queries against it using the free HeidiSQL GUI client. The latest version adds many enhancements and new features, one of which is an editor for creating stored procedures and functions. Today, we’ll learn how to […]

HeidiSQL is a free and easy-to-use GUI client for MySQL. It’s favored by many Web developers and database administrators of small to medium-sized businesses to manage persistent storage of data. Version 4.0 of “the program with the odd name” was released just a few days ago on April 30th, 2009. After over a year-and-a-half since […]