It recently came up that it would be helpful if we had a cheat sheet to find out the machine names for any given UNIX. I knew these off the top of my head but it would be great if people added more as comments.

HP/HP-UX: /bin/uname -i
IBM/AIX: /bin/uname -m
SGI/IRIX: /sbin/sysinfo -s
Sun/Solaris: /usr/ucb/hostid

First time for me to review a book on Sensual, but I just finished MySQL Database Design and Tuning by Robert D. Schneider (MySQL Press, ISBN 0-672-32765-1), and considered it to be both a good read and am sure it will prove a good reference in the future. For the most part, the author is straight to the point providing realistic scenarios and solutions. He also covers a plethora of variables that affect database performance, and exactly how to monitor certain aspects to determine which settings to adjust.

His primary focus is on MyISAM and InnoDB, as they are the most popular, but he does have a brief chapter at the end of the book covering NDB (Clustering). Overall, it was worth the read, so if you’re struggling with database performance, or just feel like getting more into the database administration side of MySQL, pick up a copy =)

I’m finally taking the time to continue this series =)

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three

Lyrics Grep

For testing purposes, I went ahead and scraped about 60,000 song lyrics off of a number of sites and developed a simple search engine for them. The script that did the scraping is pretty nasty (to handle equally nasty HTML that I had to parse through), so I’m going to refrain from posting that script and save myself some embarrassment. Make a pot of coffee, sit down, and write one yourself (or something else that’s similar enough).

Database Schema

I created a new database called lyricsgrep with the

Note: Part I is located at the page that describes part one

Disclaimer
Just a minor clarification to anyone that was confused: I am currently experiencing Sphinx for the first time. Everything I’m writing about is new to me as well, for the most part. So far, I’m drooling over some of it’s capabilities; I may come back in a month and rip it a new ass hole.

Back to Configuration… (not really, this is the bitching section)

In preparation for my previous post about Sphinx, I had originally played with a number of configuration options, and even encountered a couple of issues that caused my confused butt to have to debug a number of things, and even recompile

I’ve been looking for a good solution to manage full text search for large data chunks (2GB - 100GB). I’ve written a couple of solutions using Xapian with limited success, but unfortunately I haven’t been satisfied with it overall. Performance was good, but there were a number of issues with flexibility that have me ultimately looking for another solution.

At my usual day job, the topic was brought up and I mentioned Xapian and Lucene as solutions, however we’re looking to stay away from Java as it’s not currently in our architecture, and as I stated before: Xapian doesn’t quite have the capabilities I’m looking for to handle even my own systems. Someone brought up Sphinx as something that was being looked into, and I jumped into the typical research