Vancouver, 2012-02-17 – One of my first tasks when I started at MySQL AB was to write an introduction letter for myself. At the time, we had a small team that was widely distributed across much of the world and the introduction letter (and yearly all-hands meetings) were important parts of helping our small team work effectively.

As I've worked with different organizations, I've tried to continue the habit – when I start somewhere new, I write a relatively personal introduction and encourage others to do the same.

Here's the letter that I wrote for the Magnolia team.
Thank you Boris! Greetings All,I'm quite happy and excited to be joining the Magnolia team: the product is solid, the people I've interacted with have been great and the company culture seems a good match for me. Also, it doesn't hurt that a dear friend (Sandro Groganz) speaks really highly of Magnolia as a whole.If you are really pressed …

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With the recent cyber attacks and breaches with data from large organizations including Sony, is your MySQL data safe? What are the best practices for securing and administering your MySQL environment? In this presentation we will cover the essential steps for better MySQL security. We will also cover the different installation and administration tasks necessary to ensure your data is managed.

Presenter: Ronald Bradford
Schedule: Insight Out DB Showcase. October 2011 …

Pagination is used very frequently in many websites, be it search results or most popular posts they are seen everywhere. But the way how it is typically implemented is naive and prone to performance degradation. In this article I attempt on explaining the performance implications of poorly designed pagination implementation. I have also analyzed how Google, Yahoo and Facebook handle pagination implementation. Then finally i present my suggestion which will greatly improve the performance related to pagination.

This is the 182nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Make sure to read the whole edition so you do not miss where to submit your SQL limerick!

This week started out with me posting about International Women’s Day, and has me personally attending Confoo (Montreal) which is an excellent conference I hope to return to next year. I learned a lot from confoo, especially the blending nosql and sql session I attended.

This week was also the Hotsos Symposium. …

By “Good SQL Querying”, I am not referring to “how to make your queries more perfomant.” I am about to go on a mini-rant about how to make readable and self-documenting SQL queries.

One practice that will get me instantly going on a rant is using a comma join. There is NO reason to do the following:

-- uses the sakila sample database
SELECT first_name, last_name, address
FROM customer,address;

What kind of join did the original author intend? A CROSS JOIN? Or did they really want an INNER JOIN and forget the WHERE clause?

The answer: you do not know for sure; you can only guess. Had the query been

SELECT first_name,last_name,address
FROM customer INNER JOIN address;

you would know that the author intended an INNER JOIN; had the query been

SELECT first_name,last_name,address
FROM customer CROSS JOIN address;

you would know that the author intended a CROSS JOIN. I …

Yesterday I presented “Best Practices for Database Administrators” at the MySQL User Conference and Expo. I was successful in streaming the live video on www.ustream.tv, and you can see it in totality at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/352479.

The slides are available in pdf form. And here are some of the links I spoke about:

cacti
nagios
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MySQL 5.0 manual
…