MySQL Performance Blog

I got first Sun/MySQL Newsletter Today which among other things lead to the site publishing among other things links to various stuff related to Sun and MySQL and among other things - These Benchmarks

This may be great piece of Benchmarks for Sales and Marketing needs as they show sun stuff is so much cooler but they are so unusable if you really want to take informed decision and pick best of the component level.
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I never liked how build in Wordpress search works. it shows full documents rather than snippets it does not search comments and it does not have any query language so I always used Google search if I wanted to find something on MySQL Performance Blog.

Today we have published new search functionality for our site which is based on Sphinx. We have developed it as WordPress plugin which will be available as open source software in a few weeks - just want to test it a bit more and write proper documentation before announcing. If you would like to test it however let us know.

As you can see search functionality allows you to specify what would you like to search (Posts, Pages or Comments) as well as if you would like to sort results be relevance of freshness. You can also use query standard Sphinx query language to search phrases or Search MyISAM in post title.

Besides basic search functionality we’ve implemented list of last searches and Top searches which if both nice for fun and for SEO.

Hope this addition will make MySQL Performance Blog more useful for you.

As some of you surely know already I’m moving back to USA, so does Vadim. From very beginning we had much more business from US than from rest of the world combined so this is a great step in company development having more comfortable time zones for our customers (without having to work nights) as well as more readily available onsite consulting. This also will give better time distribution among time zones which makes it easier for us to provide 24/7 support for MySQL and other technologies.

Initially we thought of going to Seattle area where I’ve previously lived for about 2.5 years. However talking to our mostly Silicon Valley based customers we kept hearing they really want to see us in the Bay area and we thought a little bit more sun would not be bad either (especially after London and Kiev) so we were seduced and will be located in East Bay town Pleasanton.

We’re moving this weekend so our schedule is already erratic and will remain such perhaps by the end of next week.

Probably most of MySQL users sometime had a situation when they would do changes in MySQL config file without restarting server (may be matching SET GLOBAL command to do it in run time) but either because option is misspelled or because given version does not support such option the server when would refuse to start when it restarted, either on operating system restart or recovering from MySQL Server crash. In any case it is quite nasty.
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Preparing to move I’m selling stuff on GumTree which is UK based clone of Craigslist offering similar functionality but with Ads

Similarly to Craigslist GumTree is powered by MySQL but unlike craigslist it looks like they are shy in tuning their MySQL Full Text Search index configuration and setting proper ft_min_word_len value. Searching for Audi A6 will give you a lot of Audi with different model numbers. Searching just for A6 gives no results at all. At the same time we can find V40 which means ft_min_word_len was adjusted from default value of 4 which probably had even worse search quality to value 3.
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Sergey Petrunia brought to my attention the work Optimizer Team has done in MySQL 6.0 related to SubQuery Optimization.

I am excited to see this information published honestly outlining the things which are fixed now and things which are still not handled well. According to the bug sampling done by Optimizer Team 68% of reported issues are fixed (significantly improved) by changes in MySQL 6.0 which is far from all the issues but still very good number.
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Finding largest tables on MySQL instance is no brainier in MySQL 5.0+ thanks to Information Schema but I still wanted to post little query I use for the purpose so I can easily find it later, plus it is quite handy in a way it presents information:
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Guess what ? I also will be speaking at MySQL Users Conference 2008, which is always excited.
According to session schedule I’ll have one talk about Innodb Scalability Limits and another one together with Andrew Aksenoff about Sphinx.

Looking back at Proposals (+1) I’m surprised only one talk was chosen and also this particular one.

May be I should put more effort into detailing advance session description - I normally tend to provide good choice of topics to conference organizers without too many details, working these out only when we know which sessions are of potential interest. Well perhaps with amount of submissions coming these years and no special “employee” status I’ve got to change the process.

Anyway it would be great to see you all there and we shall have fun talking besides presentations both in the corridors and less formal BOFs.

One performance gotcha with MEMORY tables you might know about comes from the fact it is the only MySQL storage engine which defaults to HASH index type by default, instead of BTREE which makes indexes unusable for prefix matches or range lookups. This is however not performance gotcha I’m going to write about. There is one more thing you should be aware which again comes from the fact MEMORY tables use HASH indexes by default.
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