I recently blogged about a technique for generating charts in your raw SQL. It occurred to me that these are a little bit like SparkLines. So, I’m calling them SQL Sparklines for now!

I was writing a quick query the other day that showed how many people registered on a site over time. I thought that it would be nice to have a graph-like representation of this, so I didn’t actually have to read the numbers.

I’ve been wanting to use Rails with a master/slave MySQL setup for years. But the problem we’ve had is that ActiveRecord can’t be told to read from one server, but write to another.

Today I got really confused by some unexpected NULL related behaviour in SQL Server 2005. It really threw me to the point where I was wandering if there was a bug, but of course it was human error.