For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak. Their website is simple, the UI is very easy to use and anticipates the user’s input with great success. It is a pleasure to …

For my US trip in March, I tried flying Delta. On paper they made the best offer regarding price and flight times. I am not a frequent flyer, I do not usually fly in the US and if I should have known to avoid Delta if possible… well, I did not. Also, I have been told that all airlines suck for one reason or another so choosing Delta was not worse than choosing anybody else.

This post is not about accusing anybody, it is a simple report of my booking experience. And about what is wrong with the now popular system of customer support.

I started searching for flights using Kayak. Their website is simple, the UI is very easy to use and anticipates the user’s input with great success. It is a pleasure to …

If you read my blog, chances are you are aware of this new fad called the internet, and this new language called PHP. You’re also probably aware of things like MySQL and SQL, and the importance of data to visitors of your website. So, keeping that in mind, I’d also like you to know about backing up this data.

As I grow my business, the number of clients I run into that do not do backups, astounds me. I’m not talking about end user laptops/desktops, but rather backups of their SugarCRM database, or their file server, or even their company website, which is powered by Drupal/Wordpress/CMS Du Jour. When, not If, the database is corrupted, or the disk fails, they have no idea what they would do then. They just hope that it doesn’t happen to them.

So I did some thinking, and decided I should write a post, and make available to the world, a simple script, which I believe will at least give you onsite backups. This is what the …

To hear the New York Times' John Markoff and Matt Richtel describe it in their largely fact-free story on the technical integration that Yahoo! and Microsoft will need to do if the merger goes through, you'd think that a Yahoo-Microsoft integration will amount to a cleaning of the Aegean stables.

The writers did take the time to interview someone who did a Unix-to-Microsoft port of a web site after it was purchased by Microsoft, but that port was done eight years ago. And Microsoft's 1998 Hotmail acquisition (which some people consider to be the gold standard for Microsoft cocking up an acquisition of a *nix-based web property).

So the question is, from a technical integration perspective, could things have possibly changed in the past eight to ten years?

Well, of course they have. The one guy with direct knowledge that …

To hear the New York Times' John Markoff and Matt Richtel describe it in their largely fact-free story on the technical integration that Yahoo! and Microsoft will need to do if the merger goes through, you'd think that a Yahoo-Microsoft integration will amount to a cleaning of the Aegean stables.

The writers did take the time to interview someone who did a Unix-to-Microsoft port of a web site after it was purchased by Microsoft, but that port was done eight years ago. And Microsoft's 1998 Hotmail acquisition (which some people consider to be the gold standard for Microsoft cocking up an acquisition of a *nix-based web property).

So the question is, from a technical integration perspective, could things have possibly changed in the past eight to ten years?

Well, of course they have. The one guy with direct knowledge that …

For some time now, I have been pondering about a Storage engine for MySQL that interfaces with flat files. Yes, I see a few needs that can solve for me.
Today, browsing around, I found Ben Martin's article on Using MySQL as a filesystem. The articles uses MySQLfs to get the desired results. Not 100% what I was looking for but still a good read. Ben writes:
With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. With MySQLfs you can throw a filesystem into a MySQL database and take advantage of …

The MySQL optimize and analyze commands must be pretty confusing if judged by the CMDBA (Certified MySQL Database Administrator) exams. Hopefully this is because MySQL works wonderfully 'out of the box' and does not need a great deal of maintenance. I am looking at the questions on the exams where candidates are not performing as expected and optimize/analyze is a stumbling point.

There are several table maintenance operations that you need to know about to keep your database healthy. Failure to keep your database healthy can slow down queries and do other nasty things to your quality of life.

CHECK TABLE performs an integrity check on the structure and content of your tables. For MyISAM tables, it will also update the index statistics. If problems appear, proceed to ...

REPAIR TABLE is for MyISAM tables only and will correct corrupted tables. InnoDB tables should be dumped with mysqldump and …

I've known about the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views (or system tables) in SQL Server for a while, but I just leared recently that they are actually part of the SQL-92 standard and supported on other database platforms.

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA views provide meta data information about the tables, columns, and other parts of your database. Because the structure of these tables are standardized you can write SQL statements that work on various database platforms.

For example suppose you want to return a resultset with a list of all columns in a table called employees

SELECT table_name, column_name, is_nullable, data_type, character_maximum_length
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns
WHERE table_name = 'employees'

Quite a handy feature, but it's hard to find what versions the of various database platforms started supporting this feature, here's a quick list:

• Microsoft …

When traveling to my parents town with my wife, we used to stop by a coffee shop on the highway, where a charming couple made good coffee with a smile. They were efficient and friendly. As soon as we were stepping out of the car, they were already preparing for our usual order (espresso and cappuccino), and they had always a joke or a funny comment for us.

Once we saw them dealing with two busloads of tourists, serving whatever they asked rapidly and cheerfully. This shop was a popular stop, always crowded.
It ended a few weeks ago. Someone decided that the location was profitable, and now the small shop has been replaced by a huge coffee+restaurant+amenities resort.
We stopped there, out of habit, shortly before my world trip. The crowd was thinner than usual. The charming couple was gone, replaced by a 4 people team, who sent us to queue at the cashier's before ordering. The coffee was awful, and the barista's attitude …

To hear the New York Times’ John Markoff and Matt Richtel describe it in their largely fact-free story on the technical integration that Yahoo! and Microsoft will need to do if the merger goes through, you’d think that a Yahoo-Microsoft integration will amount to a cleaning of the Aegean stables.

The writers did take the time to interview someone who did a Unix-to-Microsoft port of a web site after it was purchased by Microsoft, but that port was done eight years ago. And this wasn’t Microsoft’s 1998 Hotmail acquisition (which some people consider to be the gold standard for Microsoft cocking up an acquisition of a *nix-based web property).

So the question is, from a technical integration perspective, could things have possibly changed in the past eight to ten years?

Well, of course they have. The one guy with …