Technical Insights

Awk does not work as expected with double quotes

Of course, I felt like an idiot after being completely confused by this for about half an hour.

Consider this: awk "{print $1}" somefile.txt

This does not work as I had expected. The reason …

Using a result set to call stored procedures for ad hoc queries

Using mysql -e’s feature, combined with awk and xargs, I was able to call an existing stored procedure repeatedly for a resultset. Yes, I could have written another stored procedure to do this, …

10 (very) Basic Tips for PHP Web Application Security

Barebones list for the things you should be looking for when developing a web app in PHP. Some of it applies to all web apps, not just PHP.

1. Use HTML_Safe (or a similar javascript stripping library) …

What caused that load spike?

Every now and then, we find that we will have a sudden increase in the number of apache processes, load average will spike up, and then go back down to normal. In rare cases, we will see the same …

SHOW CREATE TRIGGER - Nope

As of MySQL 5.0 there is no SHOW CREATE TRIGGER which is pretty annoying. I don’t like using “show triggers like “, so I figured I’d write a wrapper around mysqldump. For the …

mysqldump tips by crazytoon

Our sysadmin has a nice blog post with a few tips for using mysqldump, especially if your database is used for more than a basic site, or if you have stored procedures and/or triggers.

count(1) vs count(*) - any difference?

A while ago when I started my first job in LA, I was using MSSQL. I was told to never use count(), and rather to use count(1). Several people insisted this performs better than count(), and since I …

Why have REPLACE INTO and INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE?

REPLACE INTO will actually perform a delete and then an insert, while INSERT … ON DUPLCIATE KEY UPDATE will perform an update (as the name suggests). I would think the latter would be faster. …

Answerbag Read Write API Now in Beta

Although it’s not officially announced, our read/write api is now out and in beta. It’s not officially launched on the site or anything, but we are looking for interested partners.

Docs …