Recent Articles - Databases

Making UUIDs More Performant in MySQL

Nov 14, 2020 · 3 min read

MySQL does not have a native UUID type, so strings are often used instead, which come with large storage and performance costs.

MySQL's UUID() function generates v1 UUIDs, which have a time component that make them unevenly distributed over short periods of time. We can define our own function to generate v4 UUIDs, which are random and therefore more evenly distributed.

databases

Faking Sequences in MySQL

Nov 11, 2020 · 4 min read

MySQL doesn't have a concept of custom sequences that other databases such as PostgreSQL do, but they can be faked with a table and some clever queries.

databases

Why You Should Use UUIDs for Your Primary Keys

Jan 31, 2020 · 4 min read

Universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) are 128-bit (16-byte) numbers that are designed to be globally unique, and as a result they make for great primary keys.

Why You Should Use UUIDs for Your Primary Keys

databases

Tunneling a Database Connection with Docker Compose

Aug 7, 2019 · 3 min read

I recently had the need to tunnel a database connection from a local Docker container to a remote MySQL server. The AWS RDS instance is inside the same VPC as a bastion host that runs the SSH server. Rather than open the tunnel on the host machine and have the container connect through host.docker.internal I thought I'd configure it all in one place with Docker Compose.