Troubleshooting MySQL on Amazon can be a real test of patience. There are quite a few different things to watch out for in terms of connectivity & networking. Sometimes a checklist can help. Join 16,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Here’s my exhaustive list of things that can block you. 1. Be […]

I like the image of this city of Mesa Verde. It’s fascinating to see how ancient cities were built, especially as an inhabitant of one of the worlds largest cities today, New York. I’m a long time relational database guy. I worked at scores of dot-coms in the 90′s as an old-guard Oracle DBA, and […]

Join 12,100 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. 1. Covers databases broadly You may not have noticed, but there’s a whole spectrum of relational databases on offer. Of course in the database world, most get infatuated with one, and that becomes their bread & butter before long. Their life, their passion, their devotion. […]

Join 15,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. 1. MySQL does not compete with Oracle It’s a myth that MySQL somehow poses a threat to Oracle. Oracle’s customers tend to be large enterprises running apps like e-business suite. These are certified to run on Oracle, and further they sit close to finance. MySQL […]

Join 11,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

Bring me clients, please… pretty please!

When you first start out as a freelancer, your network is small. Without a steady stream of projects, the tendency is to reach for whatever you can find. Head shops & agencies build a brand, and ongoing relationships with firms. However a project with a middleman is a relationship with him or her, not the client directly. You lose control of a few very key things, such as fees, testimonials and payment terms.

Read: NYC technology startups are hiring

It’s all about the relationship, Luke

With independent …

A week or two ago, I got into a conversation on Twitter about technical debt, and someone shared this superb video by Ward Cunningham (youtube). Here is Ward’s Interview website.

Join 10,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

Waterfall, agile, developer or operations, devops, managers, CTOs… everyone should watch this video, for it cuts to the heart of the challenges we face doing modern software development, in a fast paced and always changing environment.

Though it’s not mentioned in the video, I would argue using an ORM is an expensive form of debt, one that …

Join 9500 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

1. Stand up and be heard

Years ago I was sitting on an online forum chatting with an Oracle buddy of mine. This was circa 1998. We were working on an open source tool to interface with Oracle. There were all these libraries, for PHP & Perl, and a lot of developers starting to build tools. We hatched this hair brained idea to write a book about all of this, and pitched it to O’Reilly. They loved it and thus was born the book Oracle & Open Source in 2001.

Writing a book was, is and always will be a lot of work. It was a great learning experience too. Editors critique your writing, and this teaches you to speak to a broader …

Join 8000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. In the past two years we’ve written a ton of material on scalability. Here’s the greatest hits… Why Generalists Are Better at Scaling the Web The internet stack is a complex infrastructure of interlocking components. An scalability engineer must be adept at Linux, plus webservers, […]

The post Scalability Tips & Greatest Hits appeared first on Scalable Startups.

Join 8000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. SQL is derided by many and for good reason. It’s key to scalability yet terribly difficult to write good code. Here’s a few quick tips to write tighter queries in MySQL 1. Get rid of those Subqueries! Subqueries are a standard part of SQL, unfortunately […]

The post 3 Simple Patterns for Tighter MySQL Code appeared first on Scalable Startups.

Join 7500 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

There’s a lot of talk on the web about scalability. Making web applications scale is not easy. The modern web architecture has so many moving parts. How can we grapple with the underlying problem?

Also: Why Are MySQL DBAs So Hard to Find?

The LAMP stack scales well

The truth that is half right. True there are a lot of moving parts, and a lot to setup. The internet stack made up of Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP. LAMP as it’s called, was built to be resilient, dynamic, and scalable. It’s essentially why Amazon works. Why what they’re doing is possible. Windows …