My experience at the MySQL Performance Coding Webinar

Last Tuesday, I attended a MySQL webinar. I registered on the MySQL website (with a site-specific email address, of course) and periodically am invited to these webinars. I’d tried to attend in the past, but something else (usually billable) always interfered. Not this time!

The talk was titled “Performance Coding for MySQL” and the author, Jay Pipes, did a fantastic job. (He is also the co-author of Pro MySQL.) The slides from the presentation are up, and he also answered questions sent to him during the presentation in some detail as well. His presentation, about an hour in length, covered both basics (like, normalize first (slide 4), think in sets rather than iterators (slides 20-23)–basic, but not intuitive), and under the hood intricacies (like, think about the size of your primary keys and consider record size (slide 6), avoiding deletes with MyISAM (slide 27) and vertical partitioning to take advantage of the query cache (slides 9-11) ) . He also pointed to a script that he wrote to find useless indices.

Well worth my time. Thanks MySQL and Jay, for making a resource like this available and free! There’s a whole lot more, so I’d recommend downloading the slides and giving them a run through, if you interact with MySQL as a DBA or a developer (or, as is often the case, both).

(On that note, I’d like to recommend the MySQL DBA blog for your perusal–apparently recently renamed the ‘Senior MySQL DBA’ blog, heh.)

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Author of ‘Ask the Headhunter’ now blogging

The author of my favorite jobs/careers newsletter, Ask The Headhunter, is now blogging. In his first post, Nick says he’ll consider some of the following questions:

Why does HR dump jobs into the Monster pit? How can managers recruit without resumes? Do all headhunters really suck? How can you get past the Top 10 Stupid Interview Questions? Is there a way to get a raise without begging?

And he starts right off with an explanation of why job hunters shouldn’t focus on the macro economy job stats.

If you haven’t checked out his site, it’s well worth a read as well, especially the articles. Of course, he writes with a bias (he is a head hunter, after all), but I find his tone humorous and his advice accurate (where I’ve applied it).

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