Generally speaking, I have been a Joomla! user and pusher.  That being said, I have a fair number of clients that in no way come even close to needing the horsepower under Joomla!’s hood.  So, I have used WordPress for a few of my clients and it is working well.

If you have a client that has a site that will require under 10 pages or so, WordPress is great.  But what about the client that has say 30 – 40 pages and they are pretty standard and there is not much “funky” to their site?  Enter Pods for WordPress.  This little gem will allow the WordPress developer to take that 10 page site to a 30-40 page site with little difficulty

I love finding these things!

Not only do database indices keep your data organized they do other things as well.
They make your database more efficient and can speed up searching for items immensely.

Here is an example.
Without an index your data is essentially stored on a chronological basis according to when it was entered into the system. Suppose you have a database of a million names, 50 of whom have the last name Smith and only 1 whose name is Joe Smith, but there are 100 other Joes with different last names. Without an index, if you do a query for people with the last name smith, the database will have to look through all 1 million records to find 50 that are relevant. Similarly, if you do a search for people  with first name Joe and last name Smith, the database will search through all million results to find anyone with the first name Joe, and then check all 101 of those results for people with the last name smith.

An index is essentially a copy of the table, but sorted in whatever order you specify. By having even only 1 index for either first name or last name, the database
is able to jump to the relevant results, ruling instantly ruling out over 99.99% of the other results, and thus saving tons of time.

The downside of indexes is that each one essentially takes up as much space as the original table. But generally the speed benefit outweighs the space issue, especially considering the low cost of memories these days.

If you have a database that seems sluggish and is performing below par, contact us and we would love to help.

Shame on me.  It has been far, far too long since I updated my site.
I have decided that I need to start blogging again a little more about the actual work that I do.
I will attempt to do that here a little more.

Stay tuned.