A web development/programming blog providing info, tips, and tricks on programming languages, scripting, Linux, MySQL and more
Mark Stoecker
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Homepage: http://www.poundbangwhack.com
Posts by Mark Stoecker
Our first WordPress Plugin: WordPress Woot Watcher
February 17, 2010 - 10:23 am
Tags: Plugin, Woot, WordPress
Posted in Development, Wordpress Plugins | No comments
In conjunction with Lee Thompson of MySQLHow2.com, we have released our first WordPress Plugin:
WordPress Woot Watcher
WordPress Woot Watcher, will monitor and check woot, shirt.woot, kids.woot, wine.woot and sellout.woot for new products every 10 hours. When a woot-off is launched, the widget will update the woot product every 30 seconds. WordPress Woot Watcher is a [...]
How to append values to an array in bash
February 4, 2010 - 1:14 pm
Tags: bash, Linux, Programming, SSH
Posted in How To, Linux, SSH/Command Line, Shell Scripts | No comments
Last week I was working on a bash script for a project at work. The script parsed through a log file with server load and disk usage statistics at regular intervals. The script was calculating the average CPU idle time, disk utilization, and disk usage for servers. After calculating the averages for [...]
Improve Your WordPress Blog’s Performance With this Database Hack
January 9, 2010 - 10:52 pm
Tags: Blogging, Database, Hack, MySQL, Optimization, WordPress
Posted in Blogging, MySQL | No comments
One of daily responsibilities as a database administrator is maintaining the health of our shared hosting environment. In doing so, I deal with plenty of WordPress blogs daily. The one thing I have noticed is that many WordPress plugins are very poorly designed and can cause problems in a shared hosting environment. WordPress at it’s core though, is very well designed, although I have noticed some areas of possible improvement. As I come across common issues, I will post the fixes for them here for all to use.
What does “Impossible WHERE noticed after reading const tables” mean?
December 9, 2009 - 12:34 pm
Tags: MySQL, Query Optimization
Posted in MySQL | No comments
When it comes to basic query optimization and analysis, in my opinion, there is no better tool than the MySQL EXPLAIN command. It can prove to be an invaluable to for deciphering the MySQL query execution plan, or the way that MySQL is optimizing and executing the query. It will show you the type of SELECT being made on the table, the join type, possible keys, used keys, rows analyzed and more.
Check out Google’s new search interface and try it for yourself
December 7, 2009 - 9:30 pm
Tags: Google, Search Engines
Posted in Google, Search Engines | No comments
I came across a post the other day about a new Google Interface in development and tried it out for myself. I have to say, it’s not bad. If you look at the screenshots below, you’ll see that the home page is using a bit brighter colors, as well as some subtle gradients, [...]
mysqldump: Got error: 2008: MySQL client run out of memory when retrieving data from server
December 7, 2009 - 1:44 pm
Tags: Database, MySQL, mysqldump
Posted in How To, MySQL, Troubleshooting | No comments
I came across this error today while at work. While trying to process a MySQL dump of a database of approximately 8 GB in size, I got the following error:
mysqldump: Got error: 2008: MySQL client run out of memory when retrieving data from server
This occurred on a MySQL 4.1 server. To get around [...]
12 Quick and Easy MySQL Tricks
In my first two months as a MySQL DBA, I have picked up a number of tips and tricks that have helped me in my daily job. In this post, I share them here with everyone. Hopefully they will help you as much as they have helped me.
Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices
December 4, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: MySQL, Optimization
Posted in Linux, MySQL | No comments
I came across an excellent article a couple days ago in my NetTuts+ RSS Feed titled “Top 20+ MySQL Best Practices”. In the article, author Burak Guzel gives some excellent MySQL tips. Due to my argumentative nature (not really) I made a few comments on the post that you can see at the bottom about 1 or 2 of the tips. The tips were by no means wrong, I just wanted to add some clarification and caveats to them. A couple of the tips, I have been using every single day in my job and they have proven invaluable. The article is excellent and I highly recommend reading it.
Where do you find your reading material?
December 3, 2009 - 12:00 am
Tags: learning, Mozilla Thunderbird, RSS, Twitter
Posted in Blogging | No comments
Anyone who is at the very least semi-serious about growing their blog, or learning more about their subject, knows, you never stop reading. There is always something on the internet worth reading in your niche and anyone who says otherwise is either a liar, in denial, or not looking hard enough to find it. The information is out there and it won’t come to you, you have to go and find it.
Avoid WordPress StatPress plugin like the plague!
December 2, 2009 - 12:44 am
Tags: Database, MySQL, Optimization, Plugin, StatPress, WordPress
Posted in Blogging, Development, Linux, MySQL, Wordpress Plugins | 3 comments
I’ll agree that the features of the plugin are nice, including the real-time monitoring, the GUI, and the sheer amount of data collected. However, the design flaws mentioned previously can spell disaster for your website, especially if it is a popular site. The information provided by the StatPress plugin is useful. However, when you scratch just below the surface of this plugin, beyond the stats, the plugin itself is horrible.

