I have another Scots word that you do not encounter in the US. It is "havering" (with a long "a"). It is equivalent in American English to "drunken weaving while walking". If you say someone is havering, you mean that they have had too much to drink and cannot walk anymore. With the relaxation of the licensing laws in the UK you do not see it much after 10 pm (when they used to close in the past) but more like 3 am when they close these days.
Now on to geeky things. I was reading this Slashdot comment. The comment refers to the ever new debate among geeks about MySQL vs. PosgreSQL relational databases. This is a debate where whenever it appears online, geeks from all corners run to the ramparts with torches in hand and begin to scream at each other. This is very much like the vi vs. Emacs debate (emacs rules and vi drools; just to let you know).
One of the parts of the comment is that MySQL is good if all you ever do is pull data from the hard disk. If you have to do complex read/write actions, MySQL slows to a crawl. The example the person uses is Slashdot itself, which uses MySQL as its database. Now, I do not know the internals of Slashdot (you can find all of that over at slashcode.org) but Slashdot moves a metric ton (or tonne) of data and I would think that they would be using complex read/writes. The question becomes if MySQL slows down this much then how can Slashdot even continue running with the amount of data that is read and written into their database every second of every day? I would bet that they fine tuned their database with settings (probably not code changes) and that makes all the difference. If you set up your database correctly with the correct settings then all will be well with your data. I think that most MySQL slow downs occur from bad SQL statements and bad MySQL settings.
posted by Chris #10:56 AM | 0 comments |
