For some of you who situated near New York City I am happy to announce that you could attend two events related to leading Full-Text search engines in open source – Sphinx Search.

First meeting organized by NYPHP meetup on Tuesday, September 25th at IBM, 590 Madison Avenue, New York. I’ll be speaking about search services in cloud environment and distributed search tips and tricks. Event is free, please RSVP.

One week later on October 1st, I’ll be doing tutorial about MySQL and Sphinx “Full-text based services with Sphinx and MySQL” …

This week we present the Sphinx Storage Engine. Ear Candy is a gotcha about setting variables in the configuration file, and At the Movies is a video about MariaDB.

Events
MySQL Connect will be held in San Francisco on Saturday September 29th and Sunday September 30th. The schedule is now online.

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While putting PostgreSQL 9.2 through it’s paces, I noticed some behavior that was eerily familiar. Back in January of 2006, Peter Zaitsev opened a bug against MySQL 4.1 that complained of a comparison of an out-of-range constant triggering a key lookup (later distilled to a feature request to “statically evaluate predicates using implicit type constraints”). [...]

Next gen app providers (and perhaps more specifically, database architects) are clamoring for database technologies that just work. At least, that’s the message we got from one of our newest customers: Mozilla. Earlier this month, we caught up with Sheeri Cabral, database architect at Mozilla and and overall MySQL rock star, to get the down-and-dirty on why [...] Read More

I wrote about the performance gains with libmysqld a few days ago but I had just too many things in my head to do a proper comparison with the MySQL Cluster / Server protocol. Yes, libmysqld is faster, but not as much faster as I thought, and blogged about. What happened was that I had another thing to try which I had forgotten about, which was to test using the Client / Server protocol without the dreaded CLIENT_COMPRESS flag (see more on this here).

Without CLIENT_COMPRESS, I could see NDB performance improve by some 25 - 30 %. But with InnoDB, which I just tested, I achieved some 98 k row reads per second! Yikes, I should have tested that one before comparing with libmysqld (in which case I got 115 k …

My now long-running series of posts on getting max performance from a very simple MySQL Cluster setup (see details here) is continuing here. As a short intro to what I am trying out here, is to see if I can validate the claim that MySQL Cluster / NDB would be a good replacement for a Key Value Store (KVS) such as MongoDB. I test this in a rather simple single-server environment, but this is for a reason, just not a coincidence: The reason is that RAM is getting inexpensive and servers that can take a lot of RAM are also getting less expensive, which in turns means that the saying that many small servers are more cost-effective that few big ones, might not be as valid as it used to be. Also, I wanted to test what MySQL Cluster can do for me, from a KVS centric view. In short, I run on one server (16 Gb RAM, 8 cores) with all data in …

Tomorrow, August 22 at 10:00am PDT, I’ll present a webinar called Full Text Search Throwdown.  This is a no-nonsense performance comparison of solutions for full text indexing for MySQL applications, including:

• LIKE predicates and regular expressions
• MyISAM FULLTEXT indexes
• InnoDB FULLTEXT indexes
• Apache Solr
• Sphinx Search
• Trigraphs

I’ll compare the performance for building indexes and querying indexes.

If you’re developing an application with text search features, this will be a very practical and informative overview of your technology options!

Register for this free webinar at  …

Read the original article at 31 Essential Blogs for Startups & Scalability

So many blogs, so little time! Here’s our list of the best we’ve found. Currently our favorite reader is Pulse pictured left. Starting to play around with flipboard too.

Nuts & Bolts Technical

Slashdot
One of the original tech blogs, that still covers lots of breaking news, and difficult topics. Very technical, with probing commentary. Beware the actual comments though, as they’re often full of immature and childish rants.

Planet …

I work on weird and challenging performance issues in the cloud, often deep inside the operating system kernel. These have made for some interesting blog posts in the past, but there’s a lot more I don’t have time to share in that much detail. Here, I’ve summarized ten recent issues that myself and the other engineers at Joyent have worked on. I’d love to see similar summaries from other performance experts worldwide – it’s useful to see the types of issues people are working on and the tools they are using.

This tutorial will demonstrate the MySQL tool explain which is a great tool offered by mysql to analzye queries for further improvement. To run the explain tool you just have to type the command EXPLAIN right before your select query and let MySQL execute it. MySQL will not execute the select query but will analyze it [...]