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Showing posts from December, 2011

Cross-platform multilingual support in PHP for the lazy programmer inside you

If you are like me, you dread adding multilingual support to applications.  It isn't that I do not like the various, rich cultures of our world, but rather that it is such a pain in the neck to implement multilingual support into an existing application from a programming perspective. One of the problems stems from the fact that nearly all programming languages are written in English and limited to the basic ASCII character set and targeted at English-speaking people.  Sure, I know of one programming language in Polish and a few others in other spoken languages but non-English programming languages are few and far between.  It really has nothing to do with America vs. whoever but more to do with settling on something we can use to get work done on a computer and English happens to fit nicely into a single byte (or less) and seems to be one of a handful of what I call "common trade languages" - that is, if you want to conduct business across international borders, it hel

How to find "useless" MySQL indexes...

I was looking for some information on some high-performance MySQL questions lurking around in the back of my mind and found this very useful slideshow: How to Kill Mysql Performance On slide 40, there is a fairly complex and nearly unreadable (without going full screen) MySQL query that finds "useless" MySQL indexes by analyzing their cardinality .  Since it is not able to be copy-and-pasted, I figure I'll save someone the trouble.  It has been slightly modified for average data sets and to fix a case-sensitive bug: SELECT t.TABLE_SCHEMA, t.TABLE_NAME, s.INDEX_NAME, s.COLUMN_NAME, s.SEQ_IN_INDEX, (SELECT MAX(SEQ_IN_INDEX) FROM information_schema.STATISTICS AS s2 WHERE s.TABLE_SCHEMA = s2.TABLE_SCHEMA AND s.TABLE_NAME = s2.TABLE_NAME AND s.INDEX_NAME = s2.INDEX_NAME) AS `COLS_IN_INDEX`, s.CARDINALITY, t.TABLE_ROWS AS `ROWS`, ROUND(((s.CARDINALITY / IFNULL(t.TABLE_ROWS, 0.01)) * 100), 2) AS `SEL %` FROM information_schema.STATISTICS AS s INNER JOIN informati