About Me
I live in San Francisco and am the Co-Founder of Two Bit Labs where we develop iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps for our clients. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.
I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.
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Recent Posts
- Backup your Gmail
- Naming your business or product, forget the domain
- Storing Git repositories in Amazon S3 for high availability
- Acceptance Testing non Ruby web applications with Cucumber
- Code readability through conciseness
- Mac OS X gem cleanup failing
- iPhone development the easy way
- Production MySQL performance tuning
- Selenium Continuous Integration Runner
- Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects
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Category Archives: MySQL
Production MySQL performance tuning
For the past 9 years I’ve been working almost exclusively with MySQL (with a little PostgreSQL thrown in) and while I don’t do nearly as much DBA work these days, I still find myself troubleshooting a query or tuning my.cnf. … Continue reading
Posted in Database, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, Systems Administration
Comments Off on Production MySQL performance tuning
Standalone Migrations: Using Rails migrations in non Rails projects
Update 8/7/2010: Standalone migrations is now a gem (sudo gem install standalone_migrations) so disregard the outdated installation instructions below Update 7/8/2009: With the latest batch of contributed patches standalone migrations now works just like Rails migrations Update 12/26/2008: I switched … Continue reading
Posted in Database, Java, Linux, MySQL, Ruby, Ruby on Rails
5 Comments
Comparing Amazon EC2 with VPS and dedicated hosting
I’ve been reading all the great things about Amazon EC2 (or Elastic Compute Cloud) and lots of pricing comparisons with VPS and dedicated hosting. I finally got an EC2 account and tinkered a bit and there’s a big difference between … Continue reading
Posted in Database, FreeBSD, Linux, MySQL, Systems Administration
9 Comments
SQL statements mysteriously not replicating with MySQL replication
If you’re using MySQL replication there’s a feature/bug that you should be aware of. The following SQL statement would not replicate to the slave servers:
Posted in Database, MySQL
2 Comments
MySQL ODBC Driver issues and Excel
Caveat: this post is probably only of interest if you’re running into this particular MySQL ODBC Driver problem. Hopefully other people running into this issue will find this useful or please add a comment if you find a better way! … Continue reading
Posted in Desktop, MySQL
2 Comments
Configuring MySQL sql-mode in Ruby on Rails
In my previous post I wrote about setting MySQL to a stricter sql-mode to make it behave like most other databases, however, I recently ran into a case where I couldn’t set the global sql-mode without breaking some legacy applications. … Continue reading
Posted in MySQL, Ruby, Software Engineering
1 Comment
When installing MySQL always set the sql-mode
As I’ve described before, MySQL has some appalling out of the box settings which will thwart your attempts at good data integrity! They’ve clearly seen the light though and at least give you an option to achieve good data integrity … Continue reading
Posted in MySQL, Systems Administration
1 Comment
Creating database test fixtures and the rails export fixtures plugin
Being able to quickly and easily create test fixtures for your database is important yet it’s not always easy. There are basically 3 approaches I’ve seen used: 1. Use a MySQL or PostgreSQL dump that gets imported before the tests … Continue reading
Posted in Database, Java, MySQL, Ruby, Software Engineering
3 Comments
Moving MySQL tables live with zero downtime
The biggest challege to moving large amounts of data into production with (almost) zero downtime with MySQL is that the old table will be dropped and the new table locked while you’re loading the data. If you try that while … Continue reading
Posted in Database, MySQL, Systems Administration
2 Comments