“The single most important lesson I’ve learned is to keep it simple. I find designers sometimes deliver over-complex, generic solutions that could (in theory) do anything, but in reality are remarkably difficult to operate, and often misunderstood.”–John Ryan

I have interviewed John Ryan, Data Warehouse Solution Architect (Director) at UBS.

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Q1. You are an experienced Data Warehouse architect, designer and developer. What are the main lessons you have learned in your career?

John Ryan: The single most important lesson I’ve learned is to keep it simple. I find designers sometimes deliver over-complex, generic solutions that could (in theory) do anything, but in reality are remarkably difficult to operate, and often misunderstood. I believe this stems from a lack of understanding of the …

via GIPHY I was at a dinner party recently, and talking with some colleagues. I had worked with them years back on Oracle systems. One colleague Maria said she really enjoyed my newsletter. Join 38,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. She went on to say how much has changed in the last …

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Join Percona’s Chief Evangelist, Colin Charles as he presents 2017 Year in Review for Open Source Database Software on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 at 7:00 am PST / 10:00 am EST (UTC-8).

Register Here

2017 is soon coming to an end, and it’s good to pause and take a look at the past year to see the impact of new software release. Colin will discuss the changes, growth and trends that have affected software producers and enterprises using open source.

Key topics will include:

• How has the software supply chain landscape …

JSON data is a wonderful way to store data without needing a schema but what about when you have to yank that data out of the database and apply some sort of formatting to that data?  Well, then you need JSON_TABLE.

JSON_TABLE takes free form JSON data and applies some formatting to it.  For this example we will use the world_x sample database's countryinfo table.  What is desired is the name of the country and the year of independence but only for the years after 1992.  Sound like a SQL query against JSON data, right? Well that is exactly what we are doing.

We tell the MySQL server that we are going to take the $.Name and $.IndepYear key's values from the JSON formatted doc column in  the table, format them into a string and a integer respectively, and alias the key value's name to a table column name that we can use for qualifiers in an SQL statement.

 …

The website or mobile app is the storefront for participating in the modern digital era. It’s your portal for inviting users to come and survey your products and services. Much attention focuses on front-end development; this is where the HMTL5, CSS, and JavaScript are coded to develop the landing page that everyone sees when they visit your site.

But the real magic happens on the backend. This is the ecosystem that really powers your website. One writer has articulated this point very nicely as follows:

The technology and programming that “power” a site—what your end user doesn’t see but what makes the site run—is called the back end. Consisting of the server, the database, and the server-side applications, it’s the behind-the-scenes functionality—the brain of a site. …

Embedding Structured Query Language (SQL) within PHP, or other programming languages, has been problematic for some. Mixing two programming languages together is just plainly not aesthetically pleasing. Especially when you have a declarative language (SQL) mixed with a procedural-object oriented language. But now, with the MySQL XDevAPI PECL extension, PHP developers can now stop mixing the two languages together together. MySQL Document StoreThe MySQL Document Store eliminates the heavy burden for SQL skills. It is designed to be a high speed, schema-less data store and is based on the MySQL JSON data type. This gives you roughly a gigabyte of store in a document format to do with as needed. So you do not need to architect you data before hand when you have no idea how it will evolve. No need to normalize your data. Now behind the scenes …

via GIPHY Amazon releases a new database offering every other day. It sure isn’t easy to keep up. Join 35,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Let’s say you’re hiring a devops & you want to suss out their database knowledge? Or you’re hiring a professional services firm or freelance consultant. Whatever the … Continue reading How to interview an amazon database expert →

I am starting a series of videos on the MySQL Document Store. The Document Store allows those who do not know Structured Query Language (SQL) to use a database without having to know the basics of relational databases, set theory, or data normalization. The goal is to have sort 2-3 minute episodes on the various facets of the Document Store including the basics, using various programming languages (Node.JS, PHP, Python), and materializing free form schemaless, NoSQL data into columns for use with SQL.

The first Episode, Introduction, can be found here.

Please provide feedback and let me know if there are subjects you would want covered in the near future.

via GIPHY I was just responding to some Disqus comments on a recent blog post. Admittedly it had a provocative title Will SQL databases just die already. What do you think? Join 34,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. A reader pointed out that some No-SQL databases do support joins. Huh? My face … Continue reading A roughneck walk down database alley →

Amazon is releasing new products & services to it’s global cloud compute network at a rate that has all of our heads spinning. Join 32,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Here’s new stuff worth mentioning around databases & data. 1. For ETL – AWS GLUE Moving data from your transactional MySQL or … Continue reading What products & improvements are new on AWS? →