How to Set Up Named Time Zones in MariaDB

If you want to use named time zones in MariaDB, you’ll need to make sure they’ve been configured.

By “named time zones”, I mean being able to use strings like America/Los_Angeles instead of −08:00 or −07:00 when specifying the time zone. For example, when using the CONVERT_TZ() function.

Here’s how to configure named time zones in MariaDB.

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How to Format the Date in MongoDB

If you have documents that store dates as Date objects, but you want to return them in a different format, you can use the $dateToString aggregate pipeline operator.

For example, you might want a date to be returned in mm/dd/yyyy format instead of the long ISODate() format that includes minutes, seconds, milliseconds, etc

The $dateToString operator converts the Date object to a string, and optionally allows you to specify a format for the resulting output.

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8 Ways to Add Days to a Date in MariaDB

MariaDB provides several ways to add a certain number of days to a given date. For example, you might want to add 10 days to a date, or 30 days, or even just 1 day. Fortunately, MariaDB makes this easy.

Here are 8 ways to add a number of days to a given date in MariaDB.

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How to Check Whether an Index is Hidden in MongoDB

From MongoDB 4.4, it’s possible to hide an index from the query planner. This allows you to evaluate the potential impact of dropping an index without actually dropping the index.

You can use the getIndexes() method to check whether or not an index is hidden. If an index is hidden, that index will display a hidden field as having a value of true (i.e. "hidden" : true).

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How to Reference JSON Keys that Contain Special Characters when using OPENJSON, JSON_QUERY, and JSON_VALUE (SQL Server)

If you’re using a T-SQL function such as OPENJSON(), JSON_QUERY(), or JSON_VALUE(), you might be wary of any non-alphanumeric characters that might be in the JSON document that you’re working with. Especially if those special characters are in the key names, and you need to reference those key names.

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3 Ways to Hide an Index from the Query Plan in MongoDB

Starting from MongoDB 4.4, we can now hide indexes from the query plan. This enables us to evaluate the potential impact of dropping an index without actually dropping the index.

If hiding it has a negative impact, we can unhide the index. This saves us from having to drop the index, then recreate it again.

Below are 3 ways to hide an index in MongoDB.

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3 Ways to Return Distinct Values in MongoDB

Distinct values are those values with redundant duplicates removed. In other words, distinct values are unique values.

In MongoDB there are a few ways we can return distinct values in a query. This article presents 3 ways to return distinct values in the mongo shell.

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