Bill Karwin's Blog

The Case Against The Case Against Auto Increment in MySQL

In the Pythian blog today, John Schulz writes The Case Against Auto Increment In MySQL, but his blog contains some misunderstandings about MySQL, and makes some bad conclusions.

The Concerns are Based on Bad Assumptions

In his blog, Schulz describes several concerns about using auto-increment primary keys.

Primary Key Access


"...when access is made by a secondary index, first the secondary

The Private Option

There's a famous case of a fumbled rollout of a website: HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance exchange used by independent insurance customers in about two-thirds of states in the USA.


These days, the an updated version of HealthCare.gov functions fine, so you're wondering what the hubbub was about when it was launched.

Poor Debut
Proponents said that a slow rollout is not unexpected.

Thoughts on Wonder Woman

The first Wonder Woman film was released this month, and it was worth the wait. It has generated a lot of commentary. You don't see this kind of attention paid to most superhero films. There's a lot to recommend the film.

Here is a summary of the plot (WARNING: SPOILERS):

In youth, the protagonist continually is told not to expect to be a hero or warrior, despite a desire to do so.
Two of the

Running PHP at a Windows 10 Command Line

A technical writer friend of mine asked me to help her this week. She needs to run PHP scripts at the command-line on Windows 10. She installed WAMP Server which includes PHP. I think she just needs to change the PATH so when she runs "php" in a command window, it will find the PHP interpreter.

I hardly use Windows these days. But I do have a Windows PC around, so I tried installing WAMP, and

Webinar on PHP and MySQL Replication

Using MySQL replication gives you an opportunity to scale out read queries. However, MySQL replication is asynchronous; the slave may fall behind.





This Wednesday, January 23 2013, I'll be presenting a free webinar about using MySQL replication on busy PHP web sites.  Register here:  http://www.percona.com/webinars/readw...




Applications have variable tolerance

C Pointers Explained, Really

While I was in college, a friend of mine complained that he was confused while programming in C, struggling to learn the syntax for pointers.

He gave the example of something like: *x=**p++ being ugly and unreadable, with too many operations layered on each other, making it hard to tell what was happening.  He said he had done a bit of programming with assembly language, but he wasn't accustomed

Don't Put the Cart Before the Horse

April 2nd I made this undiplomatic statement (funny how Twitter practically encourages being provocative):


#ZF 2.0 is a great example of second-system syndrome.
Matthew Weier O'Phinney and I have a good working relationship. I think his work on the Zend Framework project has been amazing, both from a technology perspective and a marketing perspective. 

So when Matthew asked me to clarify my

Sql Injection Slides Posted

I gave a presentation today at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, titled SQL Injection Myths and Fallacies. Thanks to everyone who came to my talk! I appreciate your interest in learning to develop more secure applications. SQL Injection is a serious threat to web applications, and it's only going to get worse. It's incumbent on you as software developers to learn how to write secure code!My

Announcing Awk on Rails

Awk on Rails is a new kind of web application development framework, with a distinction that no other framework has: Awk on Rails is fully POSIX compliant.Awk on Rails brings the best practices of modern web application development to the ALAS stack (Apache, Linux, Awk, Shell). This stack is entirely new to the field of web development, yet already brings decades of maturity.Installation is a

Rendering Trees with Closure Tables

I got a comment from a reader about the Naive Trees section of my presentation SQL Antipatterns Strike Back. I've given this presentation at the MySQL Conference & Expo in the past.I'd also like to mention that I've developed these ideas into a new book, SQL Antipatterns: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Database Programming. The book is now available in Beta and for pre-order from Pragmatic