Intro to SQL for the New Grad Developer

Ever since studying and working with databases 6 months ago, I’ve become fascinated with SQL and its relatively simple syntax. As a guide to the reader, I’ve gathered the essential criteria that employers expect you to know when applying for a database-related job.

In this blog, I will cover what SQL is, its different flavors and syntactical differences centered around an example query, the importance of EXPLAIN and SQL query runtime, and finally some example problems specifically in MySQL.

TPDP Episode #22: NoSQL Databases And The Flexibility Of A Non-Relational Model

I am pleased to announce that the latest episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast is now available for download. In this episode titled, NoSQL Databases and the Flexibility of a Non-Relational Model, I’m joined by Matt Groves where we talk about use-cases for NoSQL versus relational databases and how to use NoSQL in your own applications.

Matt Groves and I used to work together at Couchbase, which is a NoSQL database company, and is by no means the focus of this episode. The focus is NoSQL in general and all the great things that you can do with it.

Bulk Remove Unconfirmed Sendy Subscribers After A Certain Number Of Days

You may or may not know this, but I use Sendy to send out my monthly newsletters because it is incredibly cheap in comparison to competitors like Mailchimp. Anyone who has done list building before knows that over time you’re going to end up with a lot of stale subscribers that need to be cleaned in an effort to save space and keep things organized.

My email lists require a secondary opt-in to prevent SPAM subscriptions. The problem with this is I still get a lot of SPAM subscriptions even if they are never included in my newsletters. These subscriptions have no business being in my list, so it is best to remove them after so long.

We’re going to see how to use SQL to remove unconfirmed email subscribers in Sendy after so many days.

Using A SQLite Database For Local Data In A Golang Application

When developing an application with the Go programming language, you might find yourself needing to save data locally. If you’ve been keeping up you’ll remember that I’ve written about storing data remotely with Golang in a Couchbase NoSQL database, but never anything locally. Probably the easiest way to store data locally is with a SQLite database as it is a solid technology that has been around for a while.

We’re going to see how to use a SQLite database in our Golang application to read and write local data.

Backup WordPress Database And Filesystem Data On Linux With Scripts

If you’re like me, you run a WordPress blog and are terrified of the thought of something going wrong. With core updates, theme updates, plugin updates, and server component updates, there is a lot of room for error. This is where a WordPress backup could help ease your mind.

WordPress recommends taking a backup of your blog before any of these are done and there are even some popular plugins that will do this for you. For example, you could use the popular UpdraftPlus or similar, but I believe there is room for error in those as well. While I could be wrong, I think WordPress must be in good shape for backup plugins to be successful.

The alternative would be to create your own backup scripts that run on a cron schedule. We’re going to see how to do this for WordPress instances running on a Linux machine.

TPDP Episode #6: PouchDB and its Usefulness in Development

As a web and mobile application developer, you may come to a point where you need to worry about data and how to synchronize it between devices in platforms. PouchDB is one of a few good solutions that makes this task significantly easier. In this episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast, guest speaker Nolan Lawson and I discuss PouchDB and how it is being used in a lot of modern applications, both web and mobile.

Nolan Lawson is a Program Manager at Microsoft, but also one of the core contributors to the PouchDB open source project. In Episode #6: PouchDB and its Usefulness in Browser Based Development, we’re going to cover a lot of ground without actually showing how to use the database in your application. After all, this is an audio only podcast. You will however, be educated on a lot of the technical concepts and popular use cases behind the tool.

Using WebSQL Instead of Local Storage In Your Web App

When developing web applications a common way to store data is to use local storage. This NoSQL approach is great, but what if you’re coming from an RDBMS? With HTML5, you have access to the WebSQL API which allows us to use SQL queries for handling client side storage.

This guide will show you how to use the WebSQL API, which is based around SQLite, in your web application. This information can even be extended for use with mobile hybrid applications.