On the morning of June 14th, I will be giving a tutorial entitled "Maximum Velocity MySQL" at this year's NYC PHP Conference. The tutorial is a three hour look at how to tune SQL queries, design efficient schemas and indexing strategies, and analyze your code base for the best performance of your PHP and MySQL applications.

Hope to see you all there!

Ok, in addition to programming, ice hocky and singing drinking songs, Finland is also quite famous for it's saunas.  I am told there are more than 1.5 million saunas in Finland, which is pretty remarkable for a population of around 5 million.  The sauna culture has existed here for thousands of years.  But leave it to the Finns to come up with something even more extreme: the negative sauna.  Whereas a normal Finnish sauna is hot (like 80C hot) a negative sauna is cold.  How cold?  -110 C cold (which converts to the even more impressive sounding -166 F).

So on the weekend, a few of us MySQLers working at Monty's went to experience a negative sauna.  You start in the room at -30C, then you go into the next …

I won an iPod at php|tek. Since Apple does not support Vorbis Ogg my options were either to install some third party firmware or to sell the iPod. I went with option #3 and gave it to a friend of mine who is moving to South Africa for an internship that will have him traveling a fair bit. Since he is still using mp3 he got it as a farewell present. Now other friends have noted an interest in iPods as well. Since apparently outside of IT iPods giveaways are less common I will try to get each of them an iPod with my awesome computing skills (Ok, I won the first one with drinking alcohol, but I still have not really acquired the taste for drinking so ..).

Anyways the purpose of this post is to highlight some issues in MySQL that will hopefully get fixed in …

Hey all. Please comment on this entry. I’m trying to get an idea of who’s listening to what I say.

Why do you read this blog? Are you interested in community wireless networks? OpenGL development on Linux? Family? Business Intelligence? Synchronizaton Manager news? Freecycle™ development? Random Perl bits? Something else I’ve forgotten about?

I’m finding myself over-extended and I need to cut back on some of the things I focus on. Please let me know what is important to you so I know how best to re-organize my time, energy and other resources.

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So MySQL 5.0 + debian sarge == how's ubuntu doing these days?

Been spending a few minutes here and there reading about large system ruby/rails installations over a couple days. Mongrel looks like fun.

I've seen no less than 12 different articles talking about "Scaling Rails". They talk about code distribution, load balancing your fastcgi/mongrel instances, running memcached everywhere, etc. Then they *all* end in the wonderful single database instance.

Would someone remind the ruby community that scaling out webnodes is easy, and only the tip of the iceburg? If you believe a single DB is all you will ever need, I have some datasets to show you ;)

Otherwise I'm still totally sick of PHP's inane behavior. Won't be rid of it for a long time...

MySQL is a Finnish/Swedish founded company, so it's nice to congratulate both countries to this successful weekend!

On Saturday, Finland won the Eurovision Song Contest. That's fantastic - finally, Europe woke up and let a Hard Rock song ("Hard Rock Halleluja" from Lordi) win!

To explain the Eurovision Song Contest to Non-European readers, I'd like to quote Kaj Arnö: "that?s a yearly classic event going on since tens of years, which everybody watches but nobody admits watching.". That's usually true - but this years winning song literally ROCKS!

Today, Sweden won the Ice Hockey World Championships. It's the first time that the Olympic Champion wins the …

Apache Web server could frequently be bottleneck for your LAMP stack, or you might be wasting resources on your web servers. The problem with Apache server comes from "client per process" architecture which you have to stick to at least for dynamic content served by PHP or ModPerl. With "client per process" you end up having large amount of processes if you have many clients. As processes service all requests they can get you end up having a lot of memory allocated per process which is not fully released to OS even if process is serving static requests or doing keepalive. So why do you need many processes ? Keep alive is one thing, which you can disable of course. But the real problem is slow clients which need to be spoon feed. This is especially the problem for large pages and files but with bad/slow networks even small objects may cause the stall. There are multiple solutions and workarounds to this problem:

• Just get …

Jose Mourinho is quoted today about how pleased he is that the best striker on this planet - Thierry Henry - turned down two record offers of nearly $90M from Barcelona and Real Madrid to stay with Arsenal. Why would the coach of the world's most competitive team (in the transfer market, anyway) be happy that Arsenal will be stronger next year?

Because competition is good.

Who cares if Chelsea wins if they have no competition? Indeed, Mourinho has bemoaned this fact lately - no one takes him seriously as a coach since he has billions to spend on buying up every good player on the planet.

It's the same in the open source world. First, it's becoming a bit distressing to me that the proprietary players have come up with such anemic rationales for why IT buyers should choose them. Innovation? Open source has that in spades. Or how …

Here is the comparison between mysql fulltext and lucene search engines. On the forefront the only thing that distinguishes one from another is

==> speed of fulltext search in lucene is much faster as compared to mysql
==> lucene is much more complex to use as compared to mysql.

In mysql, you can simply mark an index on a text/varchar column as fulltext, and your work is done. All you need to do next is to fire MATCH AGAINST queries. Adding and modification of indexes is handled by mysql internally as and when new data is added. On the other hand, in lucene, the addition/modification of documents is to be handled programatically. Moreover Mysql is pluggable to your application using available apis. Mysql is running on a port and all you need to do is connect to the port and fire sql queries to that port using your application. Whereas in case of lucene, you will have to plug your application to the index …

These are the slides of my replication talk at the MySQL User Conference 2006:

Lars Thalmann’s Replication talk at MySQL UC2006

Enjoy!