May 19, 2013

Sphinx search performance optimization: attribute-based filters

One of the most common causes of a poor Sphinx search performance I find our customers face is misuse of search filters. In this article I will cover how Sphinx attributes (which are normally used for filtering) work, when they are a good idea to use and what to do when they are not, but [...]

Full Text Search Webinar Questions Followup

I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance.  Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording. During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions.  Here are their questions and my [...]

Introducing our Percona Live speakers

We have mostly finalized the Percona Live schedule at this point, and I thought I’d take a few minutes to introduce who’s going to be speaking and what they’ll cover. A brief explanation first: we’ve personally recruited the speakers, which is why it has been a slow process to finalize and get abstracts on the [...]

Getting around optimizer limitations with an IN() list

There was a discussion on LinkedIn one month ago that caught my eye: Database search by “within x number of miles” radius? Anyone out there created a zipcode database and created a “search within x numer of miles” function ? Thankful for any tips you can throw my way.. J A few people commented that [...]

Finding your MySQL High-Availability solution – The questions

After having reviewed the definition my the previous post (The definitions), the next step is to respond to some questions. Do you need MySQL High-Availability? That question is quite obvious but some times, it is skipped. It can also be formulated “What is the downtime cost of the service?”. In the cost, you need to [...]

Talking MySQL to Sphinx

In the recently released Sphinx version 0.9.9-rc2 there is a support for MySQL wire protocol and SphinxQL – SQL-like language to query Sphinx indexes. This support is currently in its early preview stage but it is still fun to play with. A thing to mention – unlike MySQL Storage Engines, some of which as InfoBright [...]

How Percona does a MySQL Performance Audit

Our customers or prospective customers often ask us how we do a performance audit (it’s our most popular service). I thought I should write a blog post that will both answer their question, so I can just reply “read all about it at this URL” and share our methodology with readers a little bit. This [...]

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 [...]

MySQL Performance Blog now uses Sphinx for Site Search

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 [...]

MySQL: Data Storage or Data Processing

I was thinking today of how people tend to use MySQL in modern applications and it stroke me in many cases MySQL is not used to process the data, at least not on the large scale – instead it is used for data storage and light duty data retrieval. Even in this case however the [...]