Author: Bill Karwin
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SQL Antipatterns slides
Monday I gave a presentation at the MySQL User Conference in Santa Clara. I uploaded my presentation materials as a PDF to my website. It’s available under the Creative Commons 2.0 license for non-commercial, no derivative use. Download the PDF at http://www.karwin.com/downloads/SQL_Antipatterns_MySQLUC2008.pdf
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Speaking at the MySQL Conference
It’s time for the 2008 MySQL Conference. This year should be especially interesting. Sun announced they would acquire MySQL on Jan. 16 – fewer than eight weeks ago (I bet it doesn’t seem that way to the folks involved). The deal was closed only Feb. 26, and I’m sure there are still months of work…
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TDD lesson from Sudoku
I am a Sudoku addict. I like to analyze the logic strategies for solving these puzzles. I even gave a presentation at OSCON 2006 about using SQL to solve Sudoku puzzles. The image I’m including is a screenshot from jigsawdoku.com, copyright 2008 by Rachel Lee and Gideon Greenspan. This is my favorite Sudoku web interface…
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PDO v2 CLA issues
Wez Furlong posted a request for discussion regarding the future of PDO and they proposed to adopt a CLA (Contributor License Agreement) to manage contributions to the project. Some questions have come up indicating some misunderstandings about how CLA’s work. As you may know, I worked for about a year as the project manager of…
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MacBook Air – Almost as Thin as a Sinclair ZX80
I just watched the photos and text from today’s keynote at MacWorld. Steve Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air, described as the world’s thinnest notebook computer. I suddenly recalled being at a computer graphics user group at UCSC, circa 1982. One of the hobbyists in that group had a Sinclair ZX80, a kit computer from the…
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“Pure” mysqlnd interface feedback
After I posted my idea about a pure PHP mysqlnd driver, I received an email from Ulf Wendel from the MySQL AB team who works on the mysqlnd driver. He told me I could post his comments since he doesn’t have a Blogger account. I’ll include his comments below in blockquotes and then I’ll comment…
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Idea for “pure” mysqlnd interface
When I first heard about the mysqlnd project at the MySQL Camp in 2006, somehow I thought it was going to be 100% PHP code. I can’t remember now if I was making an incorrect assumption or if they planned to write it in PHP but changed their mind. What we have today is a…
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How to Save $100 Million
Last night I listened to an interesting interview on public radio, relating a story from the New Yorker magazine about Michigan Dr. Peter Pronovost saving millions of dollars and hundreds of lives of patients. How did he do it? He taught doctors and nurses to use checklists to avoid mistakes in the intensive care units…
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In Support of the Relational Model
Every few years, a wave of people claim that the relational model falls short of modeling data structures of modern applications. This includes some really smart people recently such as: – Jim Starkey– Brian Aker– MIT researchers This trend of criticizing the relational model started almost immediately after E. F. Codd published his seminal paper,…
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Less code vs. good code
Alex Netkachov, Vidyut Luther, and Richard Heyes discuss the pros and cons of writing code that is short. Here are some thoughts from me. In general, I don’t think turning three lines of code into one line makes an application better, or more readable, or prettier, or whatever is your goal. The logical extension of…