When I initially started working with MongoDB, it was very easy to get started. I could create schemas, create data, and pretty much do everything I wanted to do very quickly. As I started progressing through working with MongoDB, I started running into more and more problems. They weren’t problems with MongoDB, they were problems with the way I was thinking about MongoDB. I Know How Stuff Works The biggest mistake that I made was carrying over ideas about how databases work.

These aren’t all of my goals, to be sure, but I thought that it’d be a good idea to get some of them out in public and start sharing a bit more. Be More Personal I want to be more personal on this blog. Historically, I haven’t injected a lot of my personal details into my writing. I did it a few times last year when I talked about a bit of personal history and again when I talked about leaving the PASS Board of Directors.

Once, long ago, men carved their knowledge into the walls of caves so that it would be available for all time. Unfortunately, their knowledge was tied to once place. Eventually, a forward thinking cave dweller thought about carving his knowledge into a clay tablet. He was savagely beaten to death and his family burned as witches. Eventually the other cave dwellers realized that it was probably a good idea to have a more portable way to store their knowledge and they too adopted this portable clay-based knowledge transfer system.

Favors for Favors Meteor in the Desert Sky Schedule Your Fun Stuff 5 Lessons We’ve Learned Using AWS – AWS is a strange monster and you need to pay close attention when you’re using it. Sharding with SQL Azure – You’re going to need to know this some day, might as well figure it out now. Masterless Distributed Computing with Riak Core – PDF Alert! Rusty Klophaus gave a presentation about how the guts of Riak (Riak Core) can be used outside of Riak to build masterless clusters – any node can go down and the cluster will still function.

Every database has secondary indexes, right? Not quite. It turns out that some databases don’t support them. Secondary indexes are important because they make it possible to perform more, quick, queries on a given chunk of data. What if we want to add secondary indexes to a database, how would we go about doing it? Looking at queries, there are a few basic ways that we actually query data: Equality predicates Inequality predicates Multi-predicate queries We’re going to be using Riak as our example database

Steve Jones created this month’s topic: What the business says is not what the business wants. Despite the inflammatory title, it’s really about interacting with business: What issues have you had in interacting with the business to get your job done? I’m going to piss a lot of you off right now: it’s your fault. Ready to get more angry? Shut up and listen. Stop. Shut up. Listen. When you start having those gut reactions about terminology, proper technique, or anything else: shut up and listen.

Last week, I sent an email to the PASS Board of Directors. It said, in short, that I was stepping down from my seat on the board. In fact, here’s the email: A few months ago I made a huge change in my career and stepped out of my role as a production DBA and into a new career working with new databases. The more time I spend with these databases, the more I realize that they need an exciting, vibrant community like we have here in PASS.

The Story So Far Brent Ozar (blog | twitter) asked me to pick a favorite blog post for the year. Since I couldn’t pick anything I wrote (yes, I love myself that much), I had to pick one from the community. Since just about everyone in Brent’s crazy list of crazy blogs about SQL, I had to pick someone from the SQL Server community. My Favorite Blog Post This Year Earlier this year, Mladen Prajdić posted SQL Server – Undelete a Table and Restore a Single Table from Backup.

A friend of mine sent me an email the other day asking about default values in SQL Server. I realized that I’ve had to think about this a few times over the years and I’ve been asked about it more than once, too. Setup We need a table first, right? We’ll also want a few sample rows in there.``` CREATE TABLE Employees ( emp_id INT IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, emp_name varchar(50) NULL); GO

Inside of us is a playground – It’s a video, but there are words in it so it kind of counts as reading. MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, Part 1: Table Organization – Robert Haas gets paid to write PostgreSQL. He’s started up a series of posts looking at the differences between PostgreSQL and MySQL. It’s interesting to look at how different databases implement various features. On this one, SQL Server does things the same way as MySQL.