When I was 24, I decided to give up my job and go to college and study computer science. If I'd have known how many database classes that involved, maybe I would have reconsidered.
Back then, we had a big server that ran a RDBMS (relational database management system) that hundreds of students all used together. These systems were big, complex and expensive. (Oracle made its fortune selling RDBMSes.) MySQL and PostgresQL are somewhat more streamlined free and open source RDBMSes. Much better, but firewalling, user authentication and backups are still somewhat of a headache. But hey, if you need a database, you need a database.
Enter SQLite.
Read the article - posted 2023-09-04
In this post, I want to have a look at how SQLite interacts with Unicode. (Also see my post The (dark) magic of Unicode.) As explained here, SQLite doesn't have full Unicode support unless that support is explicitly included when SQLite is compiled.
So what does this mean in practice?
Read the article - posted 2023-09-05
After looking at the SQLite Unicode behavior, it's now time to do the same for MySQL. Coincidentally, I'm currently migrating some old databases that were created in the very early 2000s to a more modern environment. I think those old databases were from the MySQL 3.x days, before MySQL gained any sort of Unicode support. Those old tables are thus still in the latin1 (ISO 8859-1) character set.
But I encountered some MySQL/Unicode weirdness...
Read the article - posted 2023-09-21
Finished software is software that’s not expected to change, and that’s a feature! You can rely on it to do some real work.
We need more of this.
But: how do you write software that will keep working for decades to come? Certainly don't look at Apple for this, they keep changing their CPU architectures every decade or so and after a transition period, the old stuff is dead.
Could WebAssembly be the solution? This is a pretty fast binary format that almost any programming language can be compiled to.
Read the article - posted 2023-11-01