OlinData MySQL Blog

The problem

Every once in a while it happens. A customer comes to us for a review of their site or application. We have our initial interview and start picking up the signs: they are developing their product alone. They are self-taught, self made men/women. They word certain concepts in slightly strange way. Then, we log in to the server to take a first look, and there it is: no primary keys. no indexes. Everything is a VARCHAR(100), sometimes even TEXT or LONGTEXT. There is no my.cnf, or it is only 5 lines long. No updates have been run on the server since it was installed 2 years ago. The code is spaghetti and has no comments in it. Continue Reading

A few months ago I decided to attend FOSDEM 2009, a free open source conference in Brussels, just 150 kilometers from my home in Rotterdam.
A few weeks later I bumped into a call for participation on Lenz Grimmer’s blog. I signed up, thinking I could spare a few hours and it would be fun to tell other people about this product I have come to care so much about.

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