Simon Willison’s Weblog

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4 items tagged “rdbms”

2013

How was FriendFeed’s schema less db faster than pure MySQL?

The principle reason they switched to a schemaless DB was to work around the challenges of having to make schemes changes in MySQL, which can lock the table and take hours if bit days to complete in large tables.

[... 115 words]

2012

What tools and techniques are used for relational database version control (structure and data)?

The term you are looking for is database migrations (sometimes called database change scripts).

[... 308 words]

Any source available to download sample data (in 10+ GB) for testing?

Wikipedia has some pretty interesting dumps, in both XML and SQL format: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/I...

[... 100 words]

2011

Is a relational database with many-to-many relationships difficult to develop into a web app?

Many to Many tables can be a bit of a pain to deal with using regular SQL, but a good ORM can abstract away any potential complexity almost entirely. I find using the Django ORM means I’m much less likely to shy away from a design that involves a many-to-many relationship because I know it won’t increase the complexity of the application. I imagine the Rails ORM has the same effect.

[... 91 words]