Reminds me of computer architecture

"He who works with his hands is a laborer. He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."
– St. Francis, religious leader

Skunk Projects..

"Significant progress doesn't come from the formal planning process of an American corporation. It comes from a couple of guys doing something that hasn't been set down on a list."

– William McGowan, executive

Careful with case insensitive searches

I was looking at optimizing a slow login script and narrowed it down to the following slow query:

% select p.party_id from parties p where email ilike ' demoemail@demo.com'

ilike does a case insensitive match on the email column.
Although email is indexed, the case insensitive version is not so
the database therefore has to look at the whole table to
narrow down the possible match.

Next step is to add a funcational index:

% create index parties_lower_email on parties (lower(email));

The query was still slow. (the postgres documentation alluded that ilike would
use the functional index, but when I asked for the query explanation, it didnt').


% explain
% select p.party_id from parties p where email ilike ' demoemail@demo.com' QUERY PLAN ------------------------------------------------------------
Seq Scan on parties p (cost=0.00..20766.76 rows=1 width=29)
Filter: ((email)::text ~~* ' demoemail@demo.com'::text)
(2 rows)

Postgres (7.4) was still doing a sequential scan (10 seconds)

The query became lightning fast when I queried on lower(email) directly:

% select p.party_id from parties p where lower(email) like ' demoemail@demo.com '


And the explain plan showed it was now using the index.

% explain
% select p.party_id from parties p where lower(email) like 'demoemail@demo.com'
QUERY PLAN --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Index Scan using parties_lower_email on parties p (cost=0.00..232.62 rows=58 width=29)
Index Cond: (lower((email)::text) = 'demoemail@demo.com '::text)
Filter: (lower((email)::text) ~~ 'demoemail@demo.com::text)


2 lessons:
a) If you are restraining by some variation of a column, make sure you have a functional index
b) Make sure it is used

What is Web 2.0?

O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0?

The Leading Web 2.0 Explanations

The State of Web 2.0

Visualizing Web 2.0

Web 2.0 Is Here

Wikipedia Entry for Web 2.0

Beyond 2.0

Source: Dion Hinchcliffe

Birmingham To Buy More, Not Less Open Source

Slashdot "Last week, the press ( and Slashdot) reported that Birmingham City Council had decided to ditch its open source project because a report said its trial had cost £100,000 more than it would have cost to buy Windows. However, Techworld has discovered that the opposite is true, and the Council is actually planning to use more open source software as well as to roll out Linux in the next few years. The head of IT was interviewed and he gives a fascinating rundown of the problems he had getting open source working with his systems. More interestingly, he points out that now the trial is over and he and his staff have the technical skills, they expect to save lots of money in future by going open source. Oh, and the report's figures were based on the special rates that Microsoft gives Councils just to make sure the short-term budget look worse — £58 for a Windows license as opposed to the normal £100."

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