Stephane Varoqui, Field Services SkySQL, Vlad Fedorkov, Director of PS, Sphinx Inc, Christophe Gesche, LAMP Expert, Delcampe, Herve Seignole, Web Architect, Groupe Pierre & Vacances Center Parcs – this is a big talk!

Pros: Filtering takes place on attributes in separate tables. Rely on the optimizer choice. HASH JOIN can help (MariaDB 5.3). Table elimination can help (MariaDB 5.2). ICP Index Condition Pushdown can help (MariaDB 5.3/MySQL 5.6). Max 80M documents at Pixmania, all queries come in less than 1s using 128GB of RAM (MariaDB 5.2). At PAP.fr, there is 16GB RAM with MariaDB 5.2.

Cons: CPU intensive (replication with many slaves). Need covering indexes to cover various !filter !order. Join & sorting cost on lazy filtering.

The more indexes you have in the system, the more you need to increase the …

At Percona, we’re now using sphinx for our documentation. We’re also using Jenkins for our  continuous integration. We have compiler warnings from GCC being parsed by Jenkins using the built in filters, but there isn’t one for the sphinx warnings.

Luckily, in the configuration page for Jenkins, the Warnings plugin allows you to specify your own filters. I’ve added the following filter to process warnings from sphinx:

For those who want to copy and paste: …

Introduction to Search with Sphinx

Introduction to Search with Sphinx by Andrew Aksyonoff, O’Reilly Media 2011. About 146 pages. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s page.)

This is an engaging short introduction to Sphinx. At 146 pages, you shouldn’t expect it to go into every detail, and it doesn’t. There are major topics that it omits entirely or mentions only tangentially, such as distributed searching across a cluster of machines, real-time updating of indexes and attributes, and so on. But although the book doesn’t boil the ocean, it does a great job at covering an introductory …

I'm very pleased to announce the publication of my book Expert PHP and MySQL, published by Wrox. This book was written by myself, Andrew Curioso and Ronald Bradford. The short of it is, upon finishing my previous book, Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl, Wiley asked me if I knew of anyone who would like to write a MySQL/PHP book. I had worked with Andrew at Lycos and found him to be a brilliant PHP developer, having been the primary developer of Lycos's Webon product-- which has some excellent usage of PHP, Javascript and MySQL. When I friend of mine Bob Wilkins, who started MyVBO, was looking for a developer I suggested Andrew (he now works at MyVBO), and for this book I also suggested Andrew. Andrew had also written a short book for O'Reilly on AJAX, so Wiley was glad to have …

While the majority of Percona gang travelled to California for the MySQL event of the year, I headed in the opposite direction to Moscow for RIT++ 2010 conference where I presented a talk on Sphinx. You can get the PDF file here - Improving MySQL-based applications performance with Sphinx.

I have been invited to talk at Open Source Data Center Conference in Nürnberg, Germany in June this year, so I hope I can meet some of you there.

Entry posted by Maciej Dobrzanski | …

OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! I took videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded). Unfortunately, I was busy doing administrative stuff for opensqlcamp for the opening keynote and first 15 minutes of the session organizing, and when I got to the planning board, it was already full….so I was not able to give a session.

• 
  
• Comparing Non-Relational Databases: MongoDB, Tokyo Tyrant, CouchDB by Igal Koshevoy of Pragmaticraft

OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! Not many folks have blogged about what they learned there….if you missed it, all is not lost. We did take videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded).

All the videos have been processed, and I am working on uploading them to YouTube and filling in details for the video descriptions. Not all the videos are up right now….right now all the lightning talks are up.

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• All the lightning talks belowin one continuous video (just over 54 minutes total)
  
• The Graph Engine (Antony Curtis)
  
• …

In the past few weeks I've been implementing advanced search at Plaxo, working quite closely with Solr enterprise search server. Today, I saw this relatively detailed comparison between Solr and its main competitor Sphinx (full credit goes to StackOverflow user mausch who had been using Solr for the past 2 years). For those still confused, Solr and Sphinx are similar to MySQL FULLTEXT search, or for those even more confused, think Google (yeah, this is a bit of a stretch, I know).

Similarities

• Both Solr and Sphinx satisfy all of your requirements. They're fast and designed to index and search large bodies of data efficiently.
• Both have a long list of high-traffic sites …

MySQL Full Text Search Limitations

Suppose you have a MyISAM table containing a column with a full text index. This table starts to grow to a significant size (millions of rows) and gets updated fairly frequently. Chances are that you’ll start to see some bottlenecks when accessing this table, since without row level locking, the reading and writing operations will be blocking each other.

A solution that many people would suggest right away is to use the master for writes and a slave for reads, but this only masks the problem, and it won’t take long before enough read traffic on the slave starts causing slave lags.

Why Sphinx?

The main difference between the Sphinx search engine and other alternatives is its close integration with MySQL. For example, it can be used as a storage engine.  In this way, Sphinx’s impact on existing application code …

I just filed a very annoying bug when trying to compile with plugin engines using the 5.1.xx source tarball.

Description

I am trying to test SphinxSE as a plugin instead of getting it statically linked and came across an annoying bug. When using the configure --with-plugins option only once, the engine is statically linked. When using it twice, the first engine is created as a plugin, and the 2nd one is linked statically. Here are a couple of examples:./configure –prefix=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.33 –with-plugins=innobase –with-plugins=sphinx

plugin_innobase_shared_target='ha_innodb.la'   <-- plugin
plugin_innobase_static_target=''
plugin_sphinx_shared_target=''
plugin_sphinx_static_target='libsphinx.a'       <-- static
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mysql-5.1.33 --with-plugins=sphinx …