If you have worked with an RDBMS for some time, you will likely have come across the statement SELECT 1.

However, rarely is it correctly explained to engineers what the origin of SELECT 1 is, and why it’s useless and wasteful? A google search is not going to give you the response you would hope, these ranked responses are just as useless as the statement itself.

Bloat

Seeing a SELECT 1 confirms two things. First you are using a generic ORM framework, quote, and second, you have never optimized your SQL traffic patterns.

“Frameworks generally suck.
They CLAIM to improve the speed of development and abstract the need to know SQL.
The REALITY is the undocumented cost to sub-optimal performance, especially with data persistence.”

Connection Pooling

SELECT 1 comes from …

If there is something that I love about information technology is the incredible amount of unpredictable ways that bugs can bite you where and when you less expect it.

This one I'm about to describe is a serious one, yet there has been a very quiet response from Percona bug team at Launchpad, where I first submitted it (because we use Percona server here). If you have read my other posts you know by now that I am a laz... err, busy guy so bear with me if only today I have verified that this is, in fact, an upstream bug and have raised a bug to Oracle too.
It affects 5.6.33, latest version at the time of this article.

Anyways, the bug started to manifest itself in the form of complete stalls of our main cluster, which was happening at different times and apparently in a way that was unrelated to the amount of traffic hitting the master. When stalling, system CPU time was topping 100% of total available …

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 …

“I believe that one should benchmark before making any technology decisions.” An interview with Pieter van Zyl creator of the OO7J benchmark. In August last year, I published an interesting resource in ODBMS.ORG, the dissertation of Pieter van Zyl, from the University of Pretoria:“Performance investigation into selected object persistence stores”. The dissertation presented the OO7J [...]

At my previous employer, one of the early decisions that had huge payoffs later was the SQL naming conventions. A good naming convention is more than just a nicety. It lets you write programs that don’t need to be told about the relationships among tables and columns.

There are many ways to do this, [...]