May 23, 2013

Report from OSCON 2008

So I’m back from OSCON 2008. As usually it is fun conference to attend. Though I could only come for couple of days (Wed/Thu) as things are too busy here. Same as previous year I would note the conference is not as much backend and high performance focused as MySQL Conference or even Velocity, though [...]

Sphinx 0.9.8 is released just in time for OSCON 2008

As you probably already seen in a post by Baron, Sphinx Release 0.9.8 is finally out, just in time for OSCON 2008. Even though it is “minor release” if you look at the number, it is major release in practice (and you can view snapshots as minor releases). The changes since 0.9.7 are dramatic with [...]

Is disk Everything for MySQL Performance ?

I read very nice post by Matt today and it has many good insights though I can’t say I agree on all points. First there is a lot of people out where which put it as disk is everything. Remember Paul Tuckfield saying “You should ask how many disks they have instead of how many [...]

Meet MySQL Performance Blog guys on MySQL Users Conference

Percona, the company maintaining MySQL Performance Blog has a good presence on the conference this year. We have me (Peter), Vadim, Aurimas, Baron and Andrew attending the show. Alexey had to stay because he could not get Visa in time and Maciek is staying to be able to reliably service emergencies arising with our customers.

Economics of Performance Optimization

I think every person responsible for Development or Operations of growing application sooner or later have to decide on couple few questions on how to tackle application performance. These questions are: Should we Optimize Application or get more Hardware ? Should we do things ourselves or hire an experts to help us ? The answer [...]

Large result sets vs. compression protocol

mysql_connect() function in PHP’s MySQL interface (which for reference maps to mysql_real_connect() function in MySQL C API) has a $client_flags parameter since PHP 4.3.0. This parameter is barely known and almost always overlooked but in some cases it could provide a nice boost to your application. There’s a number of different flags that can be [...]

Innodb Undelete and Sphinx Support

At Percona we are pleased to announce couple of services which should be helpful to MySQL Community and which are not offered by MySQL, Oracle and other companies I know about. First we now do Data Recovery for MySQL. We’re mainly focused on Innodb with this one because it has distinct page structure which allows [...]

What did we want Interns to do

About one month ago we posted a call for interns to work with us on various MySQL Performance related things. We got good number of replies and a lot of people wondered what tasks exactly we could offer as surely this sort of involvement should be fun and should teach you something.

FaceBook Search, Search for social networks

Yesterday I ran into the article which sheds some light on FaceBook search implementation. As we’re recently a lot into search having implemented a bunch of search projects ourselves and helped number a of customers with their full text search needs I decided to post my thoughts on this matter. First I was surprised article [...]

Sphinx: Going Beyond full text search

I’ve already wrote a few times about various projects using Sphinx with MySQL for scalable Full Text Search applications. For example on BoardReader we’re using this combination to build search against over 1 billion of forum posts totaling over 1.5TB of data handling hundreds of thousands of search queries per day. The count of forum [...]