In our latest article at Database Journal we talk about Character Sets in MySQL.  What are they?  How do they affect searching?  How do they affect data that is inserted or updated?  How can I set and control the for an application or globally in my database?  And what pre-tell is collation?  We answer all these questions and more.

Database Journal – Understanding MySQL Character Sets

Sorting a Terabyte in 197 seconds

I just returned from The 21st ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), held in Calgary, where I gave a talk about my entry to the sorting contest.  I sorted 1TB in 197s on a 400-node machine at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a record which still stands today.  (And it will likely remain standing, since terabyte sorting is now deprecated because it’s too fast.  Now the challenge is to sort 100TB.)

For many years Jim Gray ran a sorting contest to see how fast anyone could sort a terabtye worth of 100-byte records, how much data could be sorted in one minute, and how much data could be sorted for a penny.  After Jim’s disappearance at sea in January …

Ok, here’s your chance to make a recommendation on the front page layout for relationalnews.com , the new website that features news for all of the major relational database systems. Check out the three options below and leave a comment or email me with your own solution. If selected you will be credited one the site for your influence. 

The question is: we’re getting just over 1000 new articles per week from the feeds, and the current front page displays the title and summary of the latest 10 articles. This means lots of pagination clicking to see even the approximate 150 new articles for the current day. 

Option 1: display only the headlines, no article summaries, for the past 24 hours with links to the full article from the archive. Sorted by published date, limited to the past 24 hours …