Recent Articles - Databases

Generating v4 UUIDs in MySQL
Generating v4 UUIDs in MySQL
Nov 13, 2020 · 3 min read

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.


Faking Sequences in MySQL
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.


Why You Should Use UUIDs for Your Primary Keys
Why You Should Use UUIDs for Your Primary Keys
Jan 30, 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.


Tunneling a Database Connection with Docker Compose
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.