Database - Coffee on the Keyboard

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Database

A collection of 10 posts

A photo of railway tracks.

Constrain Your Data Access for Fun and Scale

ActiveRecord-style ORMs can be huge time-savers, but also blur boundaries within a system, which leads to bad assumptions and habits

A finger pointing to one of several empty boxes in a diagram on a chalk board.

Conceptual, Logical and Physical Data Models

Conceptual, logical, and physical data models has proven to be one of the most valuable things I've learned recently

An Object Caching Pattern for Django

Increasingly I’ve been treating even RDBMSes like structured key-value stores. There are still foreign keys and relationships in there, but the access patterns are most commonly by some kind of “primary” key (not always the primary key on the table, but a natural one). Normally when I do something

Django Fixtures with Circular Foreign Keys

If you create a nice, perfectly normalized database, you (probably) won’t ever run into circular foreign keys (when a row in table A references a row in table B that references the same row in table A). In the real world, this happens pretty regularly. The most common situation

Developing at Scale: Database Replication

When a website is small—like this one, for example—usually the entire thing, from the web server to the database, can live on a single server. Even a single virtual server. One of the first things that happens when a web site gets bigger is this is no longer

Surviving Pac Man

On Friday, Google showed off a fun new doodle [http://www.google.com/logos/] in honor of the 30th anniversary of Pac Man: a Pac Man clone [http://www.google.com/pacman/], complete with sounds. Unfortunately, in the initial release, those sounds started playing automatically—an oversight or an homage

Responsible SQL: How to Authenticate Users

Most SQL-injection articles set a horrible example for young programmers. Here is a very typical “bad example” of why you need to escape user data before it goes into SQL queries: (ed. The symbol « is a line break that’s not in the real code.) 1. $username = $_POST[‘username’]; // username=

Connecting PHP, IIS 6, and SQL Server 2005

I know I will be accosted for this, but at work we needed to run PHP on IIS 6 ( fairly simple [http://www.peterguy.com/php/install_IIS6.html]) and connect it to a remote database server running SQL Server 2005 (not terrible, once I gave up the Microsoft way)

Help Me Scale

I’ve been reading Eran Hammer-Lahav’s intelligent [http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/04/scaling-a-micro.html] posts on [http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/scaling-a-micro.html] microblog scalability [http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2008/03/on-scaling-a-mi.html], and now I’m concerned about my own “microblog” site, Picofiction

MySQL Subqueries

I often find it difficult to find tips and advice for doing relatively simple things in things like MySQL, Ruby, Python, etc. So, starting with this post, I will help fill that niche. Today’s topic is Using Subqueries to Simplify your SQL Queries. For this article, I’m using