Make free calls and SMSs with Viber
I have just installed and tested Viber on my iPhone 3GS. Viber is an application for iPhone and Android phones that lets you make free phone calls a…
Showing posts from April, 2012Show all
Moving Master or Slave nodes in MySQL
In this post I want to discuss with you a concept which simplifies failing-over or migration of a master or slave node in a MySQL replication setup w…
How Tables are arranged in JOINS
I often get asked how does an optimizer (being in Oracle or MySQL) decide which would be the outer table in a join. Consider the following three tabl…
Efficient Random Rows in MySQL
MySQL's official documentation dictates the use of the ORDER BY RAND() (coupled with LIMIT if you want) to select one or more random rows from a …
Choosing the ideal InnoDB log file size
I refer to an incredible post by Baron Schwartz where he wittingly explains a technique to choose the best InnoDB log file size. The idea is so mon…
Dubstep, MySQL and Beer
How many of you study or work with dubstep running in the background? Can't wait to finish this MySQL studying in a week or so until I start work…
Show a hierarchy list of Linux processes
I just found a cool trick thanks to a colleague of mine David Saliba, to cleverly use the Linux ps tool to display a list of processes in a hierarchi…
Oracle measure Transactions per Second (TPS)
In a previous post I described how I was tasked to produce a number of KPIs and queried Oracle's AWR to get such data. I was also asked to get th…
Oracle measure number of Active Sessions
I was recently asked to produce some KPIs for our three node Oracle cluster database. One of the KPIs was to display a graph trend for total number o…
Using Linux screen to be productive
Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes thus creating a number of virtual terminals. C…
Delete Duplicates fast in MySQL
In an earlier article I explained how to delete duplicate rows in Oracle using the rowid pseudocolumn. In MySQL there is no pseudocolumn, and in ord…
How Covering Indexes work in MySQL
I believe that MySQL has many cool and advanced index types which provide the best performance strategies (if used properly) compared to other RDBMS&…
Your odds of winning the Super 5
With all the commotion produced by my work mates to win the Maltese notorious Super 5 lottery I could not help myself but check out what are the odds…
Monitor Postgresql Load Activity
The best and easiest way to monitor what a Postgres server is doing is by using the pg_top tool. Usage is as follows: $pg_top -d postgres
301 Redirects on r00tb0x.com
In an SEO attempt to produce backlinks on jamesattard.com while not losing any ranking due to duplicate content , I am explicitly redirecting search …
Test htaccess rewrites with curl
If you are doing massive SEO with 301 redirects and such, I recommend to use Linux curl to test your rules. I have been doing this for the past 3 ye…
Tune Blogger for High Speed Performance
Guess what...Blogger/Blogspot blogs can load really slow even if they are hosted by Google! This is not always Google's fault - actually the majo…
Oracle export with query
If you need to produce an Oracle export with a filter/query, you may encounter syntax errors because you need to escape certain characters. This is t…
Formatting Dates in SQL Server
In SQL Server the date formatting is a bit peculiar to say the least...I used the following query to be able to go 30 days back from current date: …
Hunter and bear's 2012 birthday party
Check out this interactive YouTube clip. One of the coolest ideas I have seen in a long time! Remember, don't be a party pooper so don't e…
List user or table privileges in Oracle
This morning I was asked by the auditors to give them a list of privileges which have been granted to users USER_A and USER_B. You can do this by usi…
Migration from r00tb0x.com is complete
This weekend I finished migrating all the content from r00tb0x.com (Drupal based) to jamesattard.com (blogger based). I used a mix of scripts and xml…
My home workstation setup
This is my basic home computer setup - no biggie - a macbook connected to an external flat screen. Specs: 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 2GB SDRAM DVD R/W …
r00tb0x.com for sale!
I have finally taken the decision to take r00tb0x.com down and migrate all content to JamesAttard.com. Although r00tb0x.com has an average of 2000 un…
Consolidating blogs?
The original idea of opening r00tb0x.com was to place all geek and IT related blog posts onto a separate blog, and leave this webspace for more human…
Output table contents in PL/SQL stored procedure
With Oracle stored procedures the database developer can display output to the SQL client. This is very handy when you want to use a stored procedure…
MySQL Index Prefix for better performance
In MySQL you can optimize a query running against a table by choosing the correct index. Furthermore MySQL allows you to index strings as well (text,…
A phase without wheels
I would like to document my current status of having none of my three vehicles in a working condition :) My car undergoing a clutch master-cylinder s…
Using vmstat to detect memory problems in Linux
Troubleshooting and detecting memory related problems in Linux normally boils down to analysing and eventually determine what is going on within the …
Using Heartbeat tables to monitor Database replication Part 1
Using heartbeats in database tables is a very widely used concept for an application to determine whether two or more database nodes are in sync. Par…
