Tim Ellis - Think Big

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Tim Ellis

Doing data that's bigger than most anyone else's data since 1999. Analytics. Front-end databases. Acronym soup.

Advanced MySQL Basics

About once a year, there's a blog post from one of the current Tech Unicorns about how they had a big data problem and solved it with a slightly non-standard usage of MySQL. This is a really good thing, because MySQL is an extremely versatile tool. Assembled in

Transaction Isolation Level (TXIL) Subtleties in MySQL

Continuing the discussion around transactions, consistency, and MySQL, we consider transaction isolation levels. Setting the TXIL Per Session Remember in MySQL we have auto-commit=1. When you set the transaction isolation level with a statement, that only lasts one transaction if you don't specify the session keyword, so

How Much Does Consistency Matter?

What's Been Happening Recently Is consistency even important? We know it's contentious. Some people find it extremely important, and we all at least pay lip service to it. But really... how much effort should we put toward making sure we've got it? As you

On the Usefulness (Or Lack Thereof) of Foreign Keys

Preamble I recently spoke with Sebastian Machuca (a Sydney-based engineer) about the concept of having FK constraints in Dev and Staging environments, but disabled in Production. Here is the ensuing dialogue, edited for brevity and for making-me-look-like-a-genius. Our dialogue was good, but we were unable to come up with a