Canadian Tech News, Hacks & How To

To scale at Digg they followed a set of practices very similar to those used at eBay. No joins, no foreign key constraints (to scale writes), primary key look-ups only, limited range queries, and joins were done in memory. When implementing the comment feature a 4,000 percent increase in performance was created by sorting in PHP instead of MySQL. All this effort required to make a relational database scale basically meant you were using a non-relational database anyway. So why not just use a non-relational database from the start?

[via High Scalability]

This might be pretty obvious to anyone with basic math skills. It took me a few minutes to figure out, so I thought I’d share with the world. To round a unix timestamp to the previous midnight (UTC) use the following function:

function unixtime_round_to_midnight ($t) {
return $t – ($t%86400);
}

Thanks to Ian for pointing out my math ineptitude.

Stumbled across a tiny mysql shell – appropriately named ‘tinymy’ – a few months ago.

It’s quite a useful little bit of PHP code. Very lightweight and function interface and shell for MySQL. I use it whenever I need to verify the contents of a database table or test a couple of queries but don’t need a full install phpMyAdmin.

Thought I’d share.
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