Plurrrr

Sat 20 Mar 2021

Heterometrus silenus eating

In the evening I noticed that Adam's scorpion, a Heterometrus silenus, was out of hiding and wandering around in its enclosure clearly looking for food. So I carefully removed the two enclosures resting atop the lid and then removed the lid and gave the scorpion a mealworm with a pair of tweezers. It grabbed the tweezers instead of the mealworm and the mealworm dropped on the substrate.

Heterometrus silenus eating a mealworm (Tenebrio molitor)
Heterometrus silenus eating a mealworm (Tenebrio molitor).

But because the mealworm moved slightly against the first right leg of the scorpion it started to feel around with its claws and finally found the nice snack.

Speeding up SQL queries by orders of magnitude using UNION

One of the most common cases where SQL query performance can degrade significantly is in a diamond shaped schema, where there are multiple ways of joining two tables together. In such a schema, a query is likely to use OR to join tables in more than one way, which eliminates the optimizer’s ability to create an efficient query plan.

Source: Speeding up SQL queries by orders of magnitude using UNION, an article by Ben Levy and Christian Charukiewicz.