This particular example is going to be based on a connection from Windows XP using Putty, MySQL GUI tools and Dreamhost. (more…)

An interesting idea that a colleague told me about was a ‘security trigger’ in any application that has a SQL type storage engine. The trick is to make sure that your admin account is not ID #1 and that your administrative username isn’t one of the most common ones: (more…)

In our current setup at (“the triangle”), we have to use odbc connections to access our db2-udb database - and I don’t like it. But we have to stick with it - and that’s the way life is. The main reason I don’t like it is the immense overhead and time it takes to execute queries. Well, I did some research and found out some interesting things. The most important of which was a cursor... (more…)

PHP developers, raise your hand if you run an explain on each MySQL statement you write and use in your apps! Anyone? Ok… 1… 2… that’s it? Yah, I tend to forget that too, but luckily PHP allows us to cheat. Thanks PHP! (more…)

Although I’d like to pretend that my side jobs always are pure programming, but alas, not the case. There are times when the users send word docs to me and I have to convert them to html. Now, even these word docs might have spelling mistakes - but that’s just not ‘acceptable’ to them - I should correct those issues too! Whats up with that? But anyway, I now have a good plugin to do... (more…)

A couple months ago, I was out in Rochester MN at IBM for a multi-day meeting about communication between the iSeries(system-i, i5, as400, whatever its called now a days) and PHP/Apache. One of the things we talked about was our use of ODBC at (“the triangle”) currently to which they asked a good question - Are we using prepared statements over odbc? Well, right now, we’re not, but I think we should. As always, its... (more…)

I came across this blog posting about optimizing order by rand() and decided to make my queries better. Here is my real life example on how to optimize this query: (more…)