Databases, databases, databases

No tech updates since October the 16th huh? Well, I realised that my SQL skills were somewhat limited to some basic stuff I still remembered from Uni days (when beer and having fun was more important than learning about RDBMS’). I know enough to get by, but certainly not enough to optimise and write clean code and queries to be proud of.  So over the last week (and a bit) I’ve read the Head First “Brain-Friendly” SQL guide, and I’ve just started the Head First PHP & SQL book. Great reads. I would certainly recommend. So actually, with this in mind very little coding has been done.

A few things, have really stuck out.

One, LAMP Stack. How could I have gotten so far into my IT career without hearing about the LAMP Stack? Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. I’ve used all four of these technologies and never heard the phrase before. I’ll certainly use it now. Albeit, after a lot of reading I’m more swaying towards PostgreSQL as a database over MySQL. For starters PostgreSQL is truly open source and not owned by a singular entity, whereas MySQL is owned by Oracle. Who knows what they’ll do with it in the future? Thinking about Oracles commercialisation of Java here. . . And as someone who has programmed in Java since version 1.2 (or Java 2 as it was known back then) I was pretty miffed. Why not leave the SE edition alone and just commercialise the EE edition. No wonder Java’s popularity is on the decline. Okay, rant over.

Two, Joins. I really haven’t been using joins when I should have been all this time (I am sure I’m missing some too.). I’ll be sure to JOIN the rest of you next time I write a query!

INNER JOIN
OUTER JOIN
LEFT JOIN
RIGHT JOIN
NATURAL JOIN
FULL OUTER JOIN
CROSS PRODUCT

Finally, okay this is not SQL but linked with LAMP Stack. I always knew PHP stood for Personal Home Pages. Apparently at some point this acronym has been changed to PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. I wonder if this really means; Personal Home Pages: Hypertext Preprocessor? Anyways. . . finally able to discuss non-correlated subqueries with my peers – pretty cool 😎.