Joomla! site syndication http://www.hoekstra.co.uk 2010-09-07T09:27:10+01:00 http://www.hoekstra.co.uk http://www.hoekstra.co.uk/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png text/html 2009-11-10T12:13:03+01:00 http://www.hoekstra.co.uk index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97&Itemid=36 ... don't work very well using the MyISAM table type. Corruptions and system lock-ups are a-plenty when you have MyISAM tables with more than 1,000,000 records. The only reason you would want to use MyISAM tables is to use the full-text searching functionality, and this feature is only marginally better than using the SQL 'like' statement. Oh hell, my data is no more,It all lies on the floor!I used a cheap database,And now I've lost some face.MySQL is just such a chore! If you are hosting millions of records and need any text-searching capabillity, then your data is probably worth more than the system itself. So go for a proper, but paid-for, RDBMS like Oracle, which also has excellent full-text searching capability. Don't spoil the boat for a ha'penny's worth of tar as they say. text/html 2009-10-24T12:45:49+01:00 http://www.hoekstra.co.uk index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=96&Itemid=36 How to generate a Base36 quickcode sequence using the SHA2 hash This deterministic techique uses a hash of the sequential Integer Id of an item to generate a typical product quickcode for it, as found in many shopping catalogues. On a 'slowish' 2GHz machine it can generate 20,000 quickcodes per minute. The spread of the resulting quickcodes is near-perfectly even, which means that substrings of the quickcode can be used to construct a hashed directory tree for holding, for example, the huge amount of product image files associated with a product catalog. Using a hashed directory tree is a quick and efficient method to host millions of separate files for quick, random access, as most file systems only perform optimally with less than 1,000 contained in a directory. Example of how a quickcode is generated from its primary key integer Id: 1 => 8M9LFLN2 2 => HZ40H3K03 => 02LUJYQ2 etc. You can download (index.php?option=com_docman task=doc_download gid=41 Itemid=67) the Base36 Quickcode Generator test script, which demonstrates an implementation in Perl and MySQL text/html 2009-09-15T10:33:32+01:00 http://www.hoekstra.co.uk index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=95&Itemid=36 A quick and dirty way of stripping duplicate records out of a MySQL table!, if your table has no indexes or constraints: Assuming the name of the offending table is customers:CREATE TABLE customer_dedupe AS SELECT DISTINCT * FROM customers; RENAME TABLE customers TO customers_dupe;RENAME TABLE customers_dedupe TO customers; Done! But what if your original table had indexes? text/html 2009-07-13T13:06:19+01:00 http://www.hoekstra.co.uk index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=94&Itemid=36 Yet another bespoke file format that unsuccessfully attempts to futher the agenda of vendor lock-in: If you are running Windows, you need to purchase PowerISO from poweriso.com (http://poweriso.com) , if you are running X86-based Linux flavour, the same people offer a free program to read and write .daa files. Go figure... text/html 2009-06-30T11:30:55+01:00 http://www.hoekstra.co.uk index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=93&Itemid=36 A well-meaning person gives you a .nrg file and you will not invest in a piece of expensive bespoke software to read it. After all, you run free, open-source software and never have and never will pay for software. What to do with this stupid .nrg file?