It has been a while since I wrote on this blog. Basically I had too much on my mind (expanding my department, holidays, etc) to actually write here and I’ll promise to post more regularly from now onwards.

Anyway, as the title already suggests: I found out how you can use CURDATE() in a wrong way. One of the developers in my company asked me to help him out as his code all of a sudden did not work properly anymore. Or even better: it used to process several thousands of rows and all of a sudden it processed none.

I looked at his code snippet and it was quite a long query with a lot of brackets:

Read the original article at The Art of Resistance

Sometimes, you have to be the bad guy. Be resistant to change. Here’s a story about how stubbornness pays off. As we’ve written about before A 4 letter word divides Dev & Ops.

I had one experience working as the primary MySQL DBA for an internet startup. Turns out they had Oracle for some applications too. And another DBA just to handle the Oracle stuff.

So it came time for Oracle guy to go on vacation. Suddenly these Oracle systems landed on my shoulders. We reviewed

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a way of developing computer software applications with less effort than the traditional means.

RAD tools focus on providing code generation and automated testing capabilities with the use of convention over configuration to provide a streamlined workflow to create applications.

Even with the most advanced and easiest to use RAD tools, there are times which the traditional enterprise and the business software development vendors which are having their own implementations and in-house built frameworks are continuously refusing to adopt them.

Most of the misconceptions on the RAD are based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty

I get ask, by application developers,  “how do you optimize MySQL”.  I do lots of things that don’t really relate to a developer. I analyze the percent of queries are being pulled from cache for instance.  What a developer can do to optimize the SQL they develop is a different questions.   So here is a quick list of things applications developers should know about MySQL.

Explain will analyze your query.

This example shows the possible indexes (keys) that could be used and the index that was selected.  2,262 rows where selected and then sorted (Using file sorts) and one record was returned (limit 1).

mysql> explain SELECT 5/9*(temp_F-32) as t, 5/9*(dewpt_F-32) as td, speed_mps as spd, dir
 > where stn='KLDM' and

Few days ago we were chatting in our corporate Campfire room and one of the guys asked me what do I think about Rails developers hiring process, what questions I’d ask a candidate, etc… This question started really long and interesting discussion and I’d like to share my thoughts on this question in this post.

So, first of all I would like to explain what kind of interviews I really hate Ever since I was thinking of myself as of a developer (many years ago) and was going to “software developer position” interviews I really hated questions like “What is the name and possible values of the third parameter of the function some_freakin_weird_func() from some_weird.h” or “How to declare a virtual destructor and when it

Man, this video hits too close to home. Developers all over the world are in pain, so go ahead – hug one right now! Dedicated to all developers at blinkx, MySQL (http://www.mysql.com), and beyond.

With any code base of a reasonable size there are lots of issues you would normally take care of immediately when you come across them, however often there is just no time for it. In the end you will have to live with the knowledge that you had to leave some ugly hacks in it just to meet the deadline.

Because we have recently finished development of the next major release of our software product, there is some time now to do code cleanup and get some more automated tests on the way. Because one of the bugs that almost prevented us from holding our schedule was a particularly nasty - but well hidden one - there has (again) been some discussion about coding guidelines and quality.

People always seem to agree that you need to talk to each other, think in larger terms than just your specific problem at the time and strive for code readability and