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The MySQL Performance Blog has another gem in the form of MySQL’s Procedure Analyse function.

Procedure Analyse helps you find the optimal data type for the column values in a table.

Usage is very simple:

SELECT … FROM … WHERE … PROCEDURE ANALYSE([max_elements,[max_memory]])

A range of statistics and recommended data types and are returned for each column in your table.

For more information see the MySQL Docs on using Procedure Analyse.

I ponder the future and trawl the web.

Recently in my travels I found the awesome CloudKit.

CloudKit provides schema-free, auto-versioned, RESTful JSON storage with optional OpenID and OAuth support, including OAuth Discovery.

Cloudkit is similar in some respects to CouchDB – date is stored in JSON, access via REST.

I looked at CouchDB in some detail for a project I have in the works and was very impressed with it’s capabilities, particularly the ability to query the datastore using JavaScript and a Map/Reduce algorithm.

In the end, I have decided that the benefits of persisting* with MySQL (or PostgreSQL) are too great to abandon relational technology just yet – the Rails ecosystem has such good support for these technologies in Active Record.

* And yes, pun intended.