Author: Bill Karwin
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The Case Against The Case Against Auto Increment in MySQL
In the Pythian blog today, John Schulz writes The Case Against Auto Increment In MySQL, but his blog contains some misunderstandings about MySQL, and makes some bad conclusions. The Concerns are Based on Bad Assumptions In his blog, Schulz describes several concerns about using auto-increment primary keys. Primary Key Access “…when access is made by…
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The Private Option
There’s a famous case of a fumbled rollout of a website: HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance exchange used by independent insurance customers in about two-thirds of states in the USA. These days, the an updated version of HealthCare.gov functions fine, so you’re wondering what the hubbub was about when it was launched. Poor Debut Proponents said…
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Thoughts on Wonder Woman
The first Wonder Woman film was released this month, and it was worth the wait. It has generated a lot of commentary. You don’t see this kind of attention paid to most superhero films. There’s a lot to recommend the film. Here is a summary of the plot (WARNING: SPOILERS): In youth, the protagonist continually…
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Running PHP at a Windows 10 Command Line
A technical writer friend of mine asked me to help her this week. She needs to run PHP scripts at the command-line on Windows 10. She installed WAMP Server which includes PHP. I think she just needs to change the PATH so when she runs “php” in a command window, it will find the PHP interpreter. I…
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Webinar on PHP and MySQL Replication
Using MySQL replication gives you an opportunity to scale out read queries. However, MySQL replication is asynchronous; the slave may fall behind. This Wednesday, January 23 2013, I’ll be presenting a free webinar about using MySQL replication on busy PHP web sites. Register here: http://www.percona.com/webinars/readwrite-splitting-mysql-and-php Applications have variable tolerance for data being out of sync…
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C Pointers Explained, Really
While I was in college, a friend of mine complained that he was confused while programming in C, struggling to learn the syntax for pointers. He gave the example of something like: *x=**p++ being ugly and unreadable, with too many operations layered on each other, making it hard to tell what was happening. He said…
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Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse
April 2nd I made this undiplomatic statement (funny how Twitter practically encourages being provocative): #ZF 2.0 is a great example of second-system syndrome. Matthew Weier O’Phinney and I have a good working relationship. I think his work on the Zend Framework project has been amazing, both from a technology perspective and a marketing perspective. So when…
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Sql Injection Slides Posted
I gave a presentation today at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, titled SQL Injection Myths and Fallacies. Thanks to everyone who came to my talk! I appreciate your interest in learning to develop more secure applications. SQL Injection is a serious threat to web applications, and it’s only going to get worse. It’s incumbent…
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Announcing Awk on Rails
Awk on Rails is a new kind of web application development framework, with a distinction that no other framework has: Awk on Rails is fully POSIX compliant. Awk on Rails brings the best practices of modern web application development to the ALAS stack (Apache, Linux, Awk, Shell). This stack is entirely new to the field…
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Rendering Trees with Closure Tables
I got a comment from a reader about the Naive Trees section of my presentation SQL Antipatterns Strike Back. I’ve given this presentation at the MySQL Conference & Expo in the past. I’d also like to mention that I’ve developed these ideas into a new book, SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming. The…