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Articles about the MySQL relational data management system.
It’s possible to use the geospatial extension in MySQL for an efficient location finder. For this to be worth the trouble, the following conditions must hold. You must use a MyISAM table for your geospatial data, or use version 5.7.5 or later of MySQL. A NOT NULL qualification on your geometry column is required A … Read more
In another article I described the process of using MySQL to compute great-circle distances between various points on the earth then their latitudes and longitudes are known. To do this requires the formula commonly called the haversine formula. It’s actually the spherical cosine law formula, and is shown here. There’s a more numerically stable formula — … Read more
Nassim Taleb wrote a provocative article on Edge.Org calling for using the Mean Absolute Deviation in place of the more popular standard deviation as a measure of the variability of a collection of observations. His reasoning is persuasive to me, especially his claim that the standard deviation is widely misapplied and misunderstood. MySQL (like many … Read more
What is a date? This seems like a silly question. Indeed, if you are an independent local business person, it is a silly question. A date is, for example, the seventh of September, 2011 (“2011-09-07”). It describes a period of 24 hours that starts at midnight and ends just before midnight. If you only care … Read more
I’ve spent too many working days figuring out how to handle dates and times in relational data base management systems. From looking at the questions on stackoverflow.com it’s obvious that a lot of people have the same kinds of questions and confusions I have. I’m a lazy programmer. I’d much rather do this stuff right than … Read more