Database

Recently we moved the Transloadit status page from an unmanaged EC2 instance to the Nodejitsu platform. We kept status uptime history in redis, and obviously I wanted to preserve that data. For the new setup I did not have access to the filesystem, I only had a redis port to talk to. So instead of rsyncing the .rdb file I used Redis replication to migrate the data between instances.

Some time ago I was in the situation where I was looking at 200 MyISAM tables screaming to get converted to InnoDB for performance reasons. You probably know that MyISAM is better at full-text searches and such, but what I needed was this database stop locking entire tables when I was just doing row-level interactions. Here's how I did **in one go**.

Don't know Redis? Think Memcache, with support for for lists, and disk-based storage. You can use Redis as a database, queue, cache server or all of those combined. Let's see how you can use this power in your PHP apps.

If you want to do command-line MySQL administration like restoring databases or dumping statistics, you need the root account and its password. Or do you?

IDs are often numbers. Unfortunately there are only 10 digits to work with, so if you have a lot of records, IDs tend to get very lengthy. For computers that's OK. But human beings like their IDs as short as possible. So how can we **make IDs shorter**? Well, we could borrow characters from the alphabet as have them pose as additional numbers.... Alphabet to the rescue!