Full text is a critical point when it comes to mysql. It used to have that feature in MyISAM but that’s not really maintained anymore nor it is advised to use unless you have a very specific use case in which it might make sense. There are 3rd party solution which takes the problem away (Lucene, Sphinx, Solr, ElasticSearch) but all bring extra complexity to your setup which has its own cost. So do you need to give up on fulltext search if you’re using MySQL + InnoDB? No! Definitely not.

Alternatives for full-text search in MySQL

I have an live database with 9000+ products with category, brand and short description which is perfect to test my searches on. I’m going to run the queries many times and use profile information to collect more granular and accurate timing information.

LIKE

Well… It’s not a real alternative but just for a sec see how well it behaves.

SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE b.name, …

The General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4 has just been announced by Oracle.

The MySQL team at Oracle are excited to announce the General Availability of MySQL Cluster 7.4, ready for production workloads.

MySQL Cluster 7.4.4 can be downloaded from mysql.com and the release notes viewed in the MySQL docs.

Figure 1 provides a summary of the enhancements delivered in this release:

• Performance
  • 200M NoSQL Reads/Sec
  • 2.5M SQL Ops/Sec
  • 50% …

In Mo’ Data, Mo’ Problems, we explored the paradox that “Big Data” projects pose to organizations and how Tokutek is taking an innovative approach to solving those problems. In this post, we’re going to talk about another hot topic in IT, “The Cloud,” and how enterprises undertaking Cloud efforts often struggle with idea of “problem trading.” Also, for some reason, databases are just given a pass as traditionally “noisy neighbors” and that there is nothing that can be done about it. Lets take a look at why we disagree.

With the birth of the information age came a coupling of business and IT. Increasingly strategic business projects and objectives were reliant on information infrastructure to provide information storage and retrieval instead of paper and filing cabinets. This was the dawn of the database and what gave rise to companies like Oracle, Sybase and MySQL. With the appearance of true Enterprise Grade …

During the process of reviewing our server defaults for MySQL 5.7, we thought that it might be better to change the default transaction isolation level from REPEATABLE-READ to READ-COMMITTED (the default for PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server). After some benchmarking, however, it seems that we should stick with REPEATABLE-READ as the default for now.

It’s very easy to modify the default isolation level, however, and it can even be done at the SESSION level. For the most optimal performance you can change the transaction isolation level dynamically in your SESSION according …

MySQL’s default storage engine as of version 5.5 is InnoDB. InnoDB maintains a storage area called the buffer pool for caching data and indexes in memory. By keeping the frequently-accessed data in memory, related searches are retrieved much faster than reading from disk.

When you stop or restart MySQL, you lose the cached data stored in the buffer pool. There is a feature in MySQL 5.6 which allows you to dump the contents of the buffer pool before you shutdown the mysqld process. Then, when you start mysqld again, you can reload the contents of the buffer pool back into memory. You may also …

[Here is a PDF version for readers whose browser does not understand MathML.]

The Simplex Noise (or Improved Perlin Noise) algorithm uses a somewhat mysterious "skew factor" of 3-12. I did not find any really satisfactory explanation for this factor in the descriptions of Simplex Noise that I read. But I managed to work it out nevertheless, which I thought was a fun exercise and worth a quick write-up.

Simplex noise is constructed by assigning random values to each point in a simplex grid. The simplex grid is a tiling of the plane using rhombuses, each rhombus consisting of two equilateral triangles. See the figure on the right.

Given a point (x,y) (expressed in normal rectangular coordinates), we …

Many of you have already heard about NoSQL databases and one of the the most used tool is Memcached, where you add a cache layer between the application and database. Since MySQL version 5.6, a new plugin is available to do the integration between MySQL and Memcached. On this article, we will learn how to install it on linux, and some basic configurations of it.

Pre-requirements:
Install libevent

Installation:
To install memcached support we will need to create a few tables responsible for MySQL and memcached integration. MySQL already includes the file which creates those tables (innodb_memcached_config.sql), you can find this file in a sub folder of your basedir. To discover where is your basedir, run the bellow command:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'basedir';
+---------------+-------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+---------------+-------+
| basedir       | /usr  | …

Driven by popularity of previous post about Debian/Ubuntu builds of WebScaleSQL and long discussions during FOSDEM conference this weekend, PSCE engineering team decided to put even more effort into.

We would like to introduce:

• RPM packages available for download
• RedHat/CentOS repository

Architectures covered:

• x86 (32-bit)
• x86_64 (64-bit)

Please note that “WebScaleSQL does not currently maintain compatibility for anything except GNU/Linux x86_64.” (WebScaleSQL FAQ)”

RedHat/CentOS releases:

• CentOS 6
• CentOS 7

Packages can be downloaded from …

We have been looking at the WebScaleSQL project with great excitement. As with any new enhancements to the MySQL world, we need to test extensively to ensure we can give PSCE customers the best advice possible. Since this project is source only, we decided to add WebScaleSQL builds to our repo, so we could examine the changes being introduced by all the different collaborators.

So what is WebscaleSQL?

WebScaleSQL is a collaboration among engineers from several companies that face the same challenges in deploying MySQL at scale, and seek greater performance from a database technology tailored for their needs.

— WebScaleSQL, Frequently Asked Questions

What makes this project so special, is the level of collaboration between some of the most …

Long running transactions can be problematic for OLTP workloads, particularly where we would expect most to be completed in less than a second. In some cases a transaction staying open just a few seconds can cause behaviour that is entirely unexpected, with the developers at a loss as to why a transaction remained open. There are a number of ways to find long running transactions, luckily versions of MySQL from 5.6 onwards provide some very insightful instrumentation.

Here we will use the information_schema coupled with the …