Monthly Archives: January 2010

I recently posted an article about using BINARY(16) for storing MD5’s as unique identifiers instead of simple integer ID’s (usually auto increment); in that article I touched on one of the benefits, reducing JOIN’s, but there are other reasons for doing it too, so I thought I’d post an article discussing purely the reasons behind using BINARY(16). As I discussed in my previous article, an MD5 string is actually a hexadecimal number capable of storing values as large as 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. MySQL doesn’t have any efficient integer field for storing numbers this big so you have two choices for storage, a … Continue reading →

Over the past few months at work, we’ve seen our database grown from silly big to really silly big, it’s still a way to go to get to the size of the big boys such as Facebook etc. but it’s still a database stored in MySQL that most day-to-day PHP programmers would avoid like a midget cannibal. One of the great things about using something like MySQL (and any other “real” database) is the ability to cross-query data, i.e. to grab data from one data-set (table) and join it to another data-set (table) to get a single set of results, … Continue reading →