- MySQL – Date and Time Types
DATE, TIME, DATETIME, TIMESTAMP and YEAR, and the one difference that matters: TIMESTAMP converts to and from the session time zone and DATETIME does not. Why the pizza schema stores DATETIME(6), what the fractional-seconds argument buys you, the 2038 problem TIMESTAMP still has, DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and ON UPDATE, and how to store an instant so it survives a server moving between time zones.
- MySQL – Data Types
Picking the right column type, and the two that cost real money to get wrong. INT versus BIGINT and what AUTO_INCREMENT actually runs out of, why every price column in the pizza schema is DECIMAL(10,2) and never FLOAT, VARCHAR versus CHAR and what the length really limits, TEXT and BLOB, ENUM and why the schema uses VARCHAR instead, BOOLEAN being TINYINT(1) in disguise, and utf8mb4 — the reason MySQL's own `utf8` cannot store an emoji.
- MySQL – Connections, URLs and Pooling
How an application actually talks to MySQL. Reading a JDBC URL parameter by parameter, why `serverTimezone` and `allowPublicKeyRetrieval` exist and when you need them, connection pooling with HikariCP and how to size a pool, `wait_timeout` and the stale-connection errors it causes overnight, and `max_connections` — the limit you meet on a bad day rather than a good one.
- AWS – IAM: Policies, Roles and Least Privilege
IAM is the service you get wrong first and it is the one that matters most. The five parts of a policy document, the difference between an identity policy and a resource policy — and why an S3 bucket needs both — roles versus users and why your code should never hold a key, and how a deny always wins. Ends with the real bucket policy that lets exactly one CloudFront distribution read this site and nothing else.
- MySQL – Install and Connect
Getting a server you can type into. One `docker compose up -d` for a throwaway MySQL 8.4, why the demo publishes 3308 instead of 3306, installing the client on macOS, Linux and Windows, connecting with `mysql` and with a GUI, the healthcheck that stops your app racing the database, and loading the pizza schema so the rest of the track has something to query.