Earlier this week, I had an interesting problem someone asked me to solve. A custom analytics tool had been set up which was gathering lots of data at a rate of about 10 rows/second. The analytics table had 5.3 million rows, was innodb, had two fields which were nested JSON (stored as TEXT) and NO INDEXES. The customer wanted to be able to run reports on this table and was unable to as mariadb would just lock up (as expected) when trying to use any kind of clause.

john-hunt.com has been a wordpress site since the early 2000s, mostly a blog of interesting things I’ve discovered during my devops/software engineering career. I’ve recently switched over to using hugo to generate a statically hosted website rather than dealing with security updates that wordpress requires. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I’ll migrate the old posts over as there were a couple of posts that generated quite a lot of interest (notably the external USB data recovery one.