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 »
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 »
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 »
Surviving Pac Man
On Friday, Google showed off a fun new doodle in honor of the 30th anniversary of Pac Man: a Pac Man clone, complete with sounds. Unfortunately, »
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 »
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) and connect it to a »
Help Me Scale
I’ve been reading Eran Hammer-Lahav’s intelligent posts on microblog scalability, and now I’m concerned about my own “microblog” site, Picofiction. Similar to social »
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 »