In Part 1 of The Joy of Null I discussed a variety of ways null-equivalent values make it into the software design. Often times, developer laziness or immutability of the database tier drives many developers to insert values that simulate null values, rather than using a database null itself. In this second half, I’ll talk [...]

Often in the database world, you do not have all the information needed to create a record. For example, you may have a person’s full name but not their middle name or initial, or you might be missing their date of birth. In such cases, the recommended solution is to fill that field with a [...]

In a previous article, I discussed how to get the most out of your memory usage in MySQL systems using the InnoDB storage engine. To review, MySQL has overly conservative memory usage by default. Your MySQL instance may be using only a small fraction of the available memory, leading to unnecessarily poor application performance. In [...]