By fernando | April 2, 2009

Using MySQL sandbox for testing

MySQL Sandbox is a great tool for quickly deploying test MySQL instances, particularly if your daily work involves diagnosing problems across multiple MySQL versions. Once you’ve downloaded it, it needs no installation. Just have a few MySQL binary releases at hand, and begin creating sandboxes in just a few seconds: ./make_sandbox mysql-5.0.77-linux-x86_64-glibc23.tar.gz or ./make_sandbox mysql-5.1.32-linux-x86_64-glibc23.tar.gz [...]

By fernando | March 9, 2009

Using the ENUM data type to increase performance

While going through the DATA TYPES section of the Certification Study Guide, I was refreshed of the ENUM datatype, which I rarely use.

I usually create individual tables for enumerations, so that new values can be added with just an insert, or deprecated values can be marked as such.

However, today I got to think about the performance issues involved in all that joining, and how could an ENUM column improve a select.

Topics: MySQL | 2 Comments »
By fernando | March 6, 2009

MySQL Certification self study

I’m taking the MySQL Certification exams soon, and while I’d love to take advantage of official training, the closest classes near me will be in Buenos Aires (just a few hundred kilometers and an estuary away) in over a month, and I hope to be done with the Developer exams by then. So I’ll be [...]

By fernando | March 4, 2009

Coding Buddies

Coding Horror always has insightfull articles, and this one on code peer reviews is no exception. Why is it that writers, musicians and, well, any respected and professional artist or scientist gets his/her work reviewed before it’s published, but the same isn’t true in IT? My guess? Most programmers aren’t neither artists, nor scientists. They’re [...]

By fernando | February 27, 2009

highbase beta-0.9.4

Heavy testing, headphones with no music, lots of Sanchez Gran Reserva, headphones with Miles Davis, more testing, an updated Installation Guide, Charles Mingus & Eric Dolphy, and I still couldn’t get a Release Candidate out. Well, such is the life of the multi purpose hacker. Other people are always finding out new purposes for you, [...]

By fernando | February 4, 2009

Generating random salts from bash

From the ‘just because it can be done’ column, here comes a handy shell script to generate random salts. So, without further ado,  here it goes: #!/bin/bash [ $# -eq 0 ] && { echo “usage: salt <length>”>&2 exit } strings </dev/urandom | while read line; do echo $line | tr ‘\n\t ‘ $RANDOM:0:1 >> [...]

By fernando | February 2, 2009

I love playing Monopoly

This is the latest speed test I run against Santiago de Chile, where a lonely database server is waiting for my queries. Well, it’s got a lot of waiting to do. This results are from a 2048 down /256 up Kb/s connection for which I pay U$S 52/monthly. Yeah, I feel your envy already. The [...]

By fernando | February 2, 2009

Erlybird 0.17.0 released

Yep, I’m really late for this. However, I didn’t want to let it pass. I checked up on erlybird a couple of times before, but it was only available as a source project, and you needed a particular netbeans version in order to build the module. I’m as geek as it gets, but I’m also [...]

By fernando | January 28, 2009

Rewriting Highbase in Erlang

Why? Highbase is currently comprised of several shell scripts  and some C code. It’s actually a good project (talk about self promotion) that hasn’t reached a stable release yet just because It hasn’t been tested enough in production environments I’ve been amazingly busy during the last years. Lots of work, and lots of parenting in [...]

By fernando | January 19, 2009

Intrusion detection at the application level, for PHP

Here’s phpids, an Intrusion Detection System for PHP. According to the site, it aims to counter XSS, SQL Injection, header injection, directory traversal, RFE/LFI, DoS and LDAP attacks, and unknown attack patterns,  through it’s Centrifuge component. Installation is simple. Just download it, copy the lib directory to a directory in your project structure, or add [...]