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I just installed Android Gingerbread (2.3) on my HTC Droid Eris. To understand the significance of this little achievement, we need to examine the wonderful world of smartphones, and why the market insists on doing a half-assed job.

The Eris was released November 6th, 2009. In the phone world, especially now that the smartphone market is heating up, this is somewhat ancient. It’s second-generation in a fifth and sixth generation world. It will never “officially” have anything higher than Android Eclaire (2.1). I’ve already been running Froyo (2.2) for months. It fixed a ton of bugs plaguing the official release, and improved the overall experience drastically.

Ah, query hints. For all those times when the database isn’t doing what you want, they’re a useful tool for forcing the query optimizer to perform your bidding. But in this case, not only is the road to Hell paved with good intentions, it’s paved with a frictionless slide directly into a wood chipper that empties handily into an active volcano. With query hints, be careful what you wish for, because—to the detriment of all you hold dear—you just might get it.

Ok, so I’ve already corrected gaudy and horrible behavior part and parcel with default PostgreSQL installs, but what about that… other open-source SQL database? Is it wrong too? Sure is!

Fixing Your Damn Server Again

My fake system still has 8GB of RAM, but we’ll be using more of it for a MySQL install. Why? Because MySQL’s planner makes different assumptions about memory allocation than PostgreSQL. Remember sysctl.conf? Put this in there:

So you’ve decided to use PostgreSQL as the database for your sparkly new website running some variant of a LAMP stack. Or maybe you just got a new job and must now administer a PostgreSQL install so you excitedly did your research. You’ve read the install docs, tinkered on a VM, and you think you’ve got everything ready.

It’s about time I write about something that is near and dear to our hearts. Something that affects the whole of our society and is probably one of the most pressing issues in the world today.

Yes, the quality of the Borders website threatens the very internet itself. Let’s see what this bastion of quality provides the public.