Sean Hull

Introduction Query optimization is the often overlooked part of applications.  Development schedules being what they are, getting the right results and getting the application working are the main priorities.  So thoroughly testing, and benchmarking queries is often left as an afterthought.    With our short introduction to query optimization in MySQL, we hope to encourage […]

Introduction MySQL’s query cache is an impressive piece of engineering if sometimes misunderstood.  Keeping it optimized and used efficiently can make a big difference in the overall throughput of your application, so it’s worth taking a look under the hood, understanding it, and then keeping it tuned optimally. How It Works A lot of database […]

Introduction MySQL Replication is some sophisticated and flexible technology. As we discussed in our recent article "Fixing MySQL Replication", it can be made quite reliable and robust if the right tools are used to keep it running smoothly. But what of sites who are experiencing enormous load on the primary server, which is overloading the […]

Introduction A proxy is a person who performs legal duties in another person’s stead.  In technology, a web-proxy can provide anonymity, making your web surfing appear to originate from your proxy’s location.  Proxies are also used to cache data between a client browser, and the actual web server hosting data.   Given all of that, […]

Introduction MySQL has some powerful replication technology. It can be configured to replicate everything, or subsets of schemas or even individual tables. Those slave databases can themselves be masters as well, feeding still more databases a stream of transactions from the master. Despite the technology’s obvious power, it is not bulletproof. There are times when […]

Introduction MySQL has some powerful replication technology. It can be configured to replicate everything, or subsets of schemas or even individual tables. Those slave databases can themselves be masters as well, feeding still more databases a stream of transactions from the master. Despite the technology’s obvious power, it is not bulletproof. There are times when […]

Introduction For those of you who’ve used the longstanding statspack, you’ll find a lot that is familiar with AWR.  and for those new to this method of performance tuning, you’ll be happy to learn about all the additions that make AWR better, and easier to work with. Improvements Over Statspack The old statspack had to […]

If you’re already familiar with PHP for database backed web-applications, you’re probably also familiar with LAMP, O’Reilly’s acronym for the hugely popular Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP stack of software. For you then to jump to Oracle will be a small step, as you’ll simply have to learn some new calls that make up the oci8 library. If you’re […]

There are lots of day-to-day tasks that DBAs and developers encounter such as needing to debug or instrument some code, or wanting to get the SQL to recreate tables and indexes.  As it turns out, Oracle actually supplies quite a large complement of pl/sql stored procedures, packages, and functions, which can help with some of these […]

There’s a lot of talk about ASM, but what the heck is it really? ASM is effectively an abstraction layer, allowing your Oracle database to work with abstract space called diskgroups, instead of datafiles directly. This provides lots of benefits, but also requires learning some new concepts, commands, utilities, and administration tasks. So take a […]

1. Introduction Perl is a powerful scripting language that has grown into a fully-fledged programming language, as good as Java (many would argue better), and though not as efficient, at least as functional and powerful as C.  It can meet your day-to-day scripting needs as a database administrator, and if used prudently, and responsibly, as […]

Introduction If you are new to databases, or perhaps new to Oracle, you may find the discussion on indexes and indexing strategy complicated.  Don’t fret.  To get started it’s fairly straightforward, and as long as you pay attention to the options relevant to day-to-day dba needs, it should remain fairly simple. Common Usage Indexes b-tree […]