MySQL

Indexes and partitioning can help with SQL performance, but they're not cure-alls. Through everyday examples of date range and LIKE queries, find out how to "think like an RDBMS" to make yours run faster.

Sorting a table can make some queries faster—but the maintenance cost is untenable. Enter real database indexes and their most common implementation structure: the B-tree.

Properly used, an SQL database index can be so effective that it might seem like magic. But the following series of exercises will show that underneath, the logic of most SQL indexes---and wielding them correctly---is quite straightforward.

Flaws in your database design are like cracks in your application’s foundations. If left unchecked, trying to fix them down the line will be costly to say the least. In this article, Toptal Freelance Software Engineer Fernando Martinez discusses some of the most common database design bad practices and how to avoid them.

Developers often work on only one machine, and have their whole development environment on that machine. Testing database replication before deploying changes in this kind of a development environment can be a challenging task. In this article, Toptal engineer Ivan Bojovic guides us through a step-by-step tutorial on how to implement MySQL master-slave replication on one machine.

Once you step beyond the comfortable confines of English-only character sets, you quickly find yourself entangled in the wonderfully wacky world of UTF-8. Indeed, navigating through UTF-8 related issues can be a frustrating and hair-pulling experience. This post provides a concise cookbook for addressing these issues when working with PHP and MySQL in particular, based on practical experience and lessons learned.

I live in Córdoba, Argentina, approximately 130 kilometers (~80 miles) away from the lake where I kitesurf. Thats roughly a two-hour drive, which I can deal with. But I can't deal with the fact that weather forecasts are inaccurate. And where I live, good wind conditions last just a couple of hours. The last thing you want to do is clear up your Monday schedule to go kitesurfing and find yourself cursing the gods on a windless lake after two hours of driving. I needed to know the wind conditions of my favorite kitesurfing spot—in real time. So I decided to build my own weather station.