This post is a follow-up to my talk at JavaDeus 2008 where I showed how you can make use of Lucene inside of MySQL using an experimental branch and some triggers and stored procedures.

Since the process is not entirely obvious and the branch is very experimental, I thought it would be a nice thing to put it online. It’s pretty amazing with how little code (in Java and otherwise) you can implement a working full-text search engine that simply doesn’t get into your way :)

Note: Be advised that the MySQL server we will build is likely to crash at times. Do not use it in production! And of course, always have a safe backup of important data.

This first part will cover the basics on how the get the necessary foundation in place, configuring the server and …

Here’s a rundown of Thursday (day 3) of the MySQL Conference and Expo. This day’s sessions were much more interesting to me than Wednesday’s, and in fact I wanted to go to several of them in a single time slot a couple of times.

Inside the PBXT Storage Engine

This session was, as it sounds, a look at the internals of PBXT, a transactional storage engine for MySQL that has some interesting design techniques. I had been looking forward to this session for a while, and Paul McCullagh’s nice explanations with clear diagrams were a welcome aid to understanding how PBXT works. Unlike some of the other storage engines, PBXT is being developed in full daylight, with an emphasis on community involvement and input. (Indeed, I may be contributing to it myself, in order to make its monitoring and tuning capabilities second to none).

PBXT has not only a unique design, but a …

With the introduction of mysql 5.1, they have introduced full text plugins which allows people to write their own parsers.

Now I’m not an expert in Lucene or this new feature, but it seems that both of these products are heading for the same point, One of the benefits I have often heard touted was that lucene had better relevancy, while mysql was faster. (no I don’t have any numbers to back this up.. maybe when my Sun Fire comes I’ll try loading this up as my ‘benchmark’). So it will be interesting to actually do some experimentation to see if you could get the best of both worlds.

maybe someone can sponsor me to re-tool nutch to work with a pure mysql back-end (Brian/Zack ?? are you reading this? does MySQL want to give …