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How to Make Your Persistent Queues Run Faster Safely

May 04, 2016

What is a Persistent Queue? A persistent queue is a list of objects that persist in the database waiting to be polled and processed in some way. Usually it is a table that has columns for data, timestamp of when the object persisted, and timestamp of when the object is polled. As opposed to an… Read more

No Downtime Database Schema Changes

August 15, 2010

Maintaining database compatibility while deploying north of 30 times a day often raises a slew of questions during our tech talks. In this post, we will cover backward and forward compatible database schema changes. We will survey specific classes of change and describe how they enable no downtime rollouts. For formalists out there, we are… Read more

MySQL Unicode Escape Sequences

October 27, 2009

While debugging some character encoding issues today, I decided it would help to directly populate a database table with some test strings containing non-latin characters. I hoped the mysql client would, by chance, support C-, Java- or Ruby-style Unicode escape sequences. Alas, it does not. A couple of searches later, all I’d found was my… Read more