In case you haven’t heard about the new Massachusetts state law regarding consumer or client information in databases, you can read about it here, at Information Week, or just Google for “Massachusetts data security law”. And if you haven’t read about, then I strongly suggest you do. This is one of those instances where I believe their heart is in the right place, even if the execution/implementation wasn’t perfect.
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Erics Tech Blog Thoughts, musings, and other idealistic (sometimes useful) systems and development hoopla.
New Massachusetts Security Law Passed For Databases
27 Apr 2010 — ericSpeeding Up Your Selects and Sorts
4 Mar 2010 — ericWhen you are using a framework, they typically set your VARCHAR size automatically to 255. This is normally fine since you are letting the framework abstract you away from most of the SQL. But if you interact with your SQL, there is a way to get a decent speed increase on your SELECTs and ORDER BYs when you are working with VARCHARs.
The VARCHAR data type is only variable character size for storage, not for sorting and buffering. In fact, since the MySQL optimizer doesn’t know how big the data in that column can be, it has to allocate the maximum size possible for that column. So for sorting and buffering of the name and email columns below would take up 310 bytes per row.
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Model Specific Formatted Search Results Using Thinking Sphinx
8 Feb 2010 — ericHaving recently implemented Thinking Sphinx on one of my web sites, I thought it would be cool to be able to search every indexed model. With Thinking Sphinx, it’s easy to have a bunch of different classes returned in the results. The tougher part is displaying them in a way that is organized (although admittedly not very DRY).
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When To Use MySQL Cursor Classes In Python
18 Jan 2010 — ericI have been writing a lot of code that has been interacting with MySQL lately. Sometimes I find it easier to work the result set in a dictionary form and other times it is easier with an array. But in order to not break all your code, it is necessary to set a default cursor class that keeps your code consistent. More often than not, I find using using a arrays is easier since I just want quick access to all the retrieved data. I also end up making my SELECT calls while specifying the columns and order of the columns I want returned.
The reason that using cursor classes is handy is because Python doesn’t come with a mysql_fetch_assoc like PHP or selectrow_hashref like Perl’s DBI interface. Python uses cursor dictionaries to bridge this gap. Ultimately your result is the same. But as with Perl and PHP, defaulting to cursor dictionaries isn’t a good idea for larger datasets because of the extra processing time and memory required to convert the data.
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