1. Defragging the Stimulus -- each [recovery] site has its own silo of data, and no site is complete. What we need is a unified point of access to all sources of information: firsthand reports from Recovery.gov and state portals, commentary from StimulusWatch and MetaCarta, and more. Suggests that Recovery.gov should be the hub for this presently-decentralised pile of recovery data.
2. Memetracker -- site accompanying the research written up by the New York Times as Researchers at Cornell, using powerful computers and clever algorithms, studied the news cycle by looking for repeated phrases and tracking their appearances on 1.6 million …

In the MySQL Community team, our charter is to serve the MySQL community — new and old MySQL users alike. One of the ways we do this is by facilitating information exchange between community members, where the new can learn from the old.

And there’s been lots of that information exchange going on, such as over mailing lists (in the early days the dominant vehicle), forums, and Planet MySQL.

One problem with this information exchange has been its ephemeral nature. The same questions pop up for many new users, and should they for some reason not be amongst the issues solved in the MySQL documentation, chances are you’ll have to know quite precisely what you’re looking for when coming up with your Google search phrases. Of course, browsing Planet MySQL is a great way of keeping up to …

A particular blog entry usually feels relevant and topical when fresh, at least to the author. So let’s say a blog entry even carries some non-zero long-term value. How do you find it after a while? And more importantly, how will your readers find your blog entry?

Descriptive subjects go a long way. But your readers may be searching for “development model” when your header says “release plan”. And even if you anticipate the search words used by your readers, you can only pick one wording for your header.

Full-text search also helps. There’s now a brand new Search field in the top left corner of Planet MySQL. Chances are you’ll find what you look for, no matter if search for “Chinese”, “DRBD”, “development” or “PHP”. You may even search for several words, such as “Chinese, UTF”.

Easy searchability calls for yet a bit more, namely tagging. …

Well, let me cut right to the chase. You can finally search the archives of PlanetMySQL. Yes, just go to the sidebar, enter your query and off you go. Yes, it is using a MySQL fulltext search index, and why not, we are MySQL after all ;) The search is happening in Boolean Mode so all the operators and expectations for doing such a search will help you find whatever you are looking for.

But Wait...! There's a bit more than that.

You might notice under each post title there's a new row of words.

We've been importing the tags you place on your posts for years, we just never did anything with them. So what can you do?

* You can see how people tagged their posts
* You can click on a tag and see all the similar tags across PlanetMySQL
* …

You guys are generating an amazing amount of feedback on your blogs. Matt mentioned in the April Wrap-Up that there were 8.6 million comments! Comments are flying in every second of the day.

And have you ever had one of those blog posts that was good, but the real action was in the comments? The blog post is only half the story, it’s the feedback from everyone else that fills in the rest. To make it easier to find the second half of these stories we’ve added comment search to WordPress.com search.

Select the comments options from the WordPress.com search page and we’ll hunt through the millions of comments that have been added to WordPress.com blogs to find what you are looking for. To …

One of the things that has always bothered me about replication is that the binary logs are written to disk and then read from disk.

There is are two threads which are for the most part, unaware of each other.

One thread reads the remote binary logs, and the other writes them to disk.

While the Linux page buffer CAN work to buffer these logs, the first write will cause additional disk load.

One strategy, which could seriously boost performance in some situations, would be to pre-read say 10-50MB of data and just keep it in memory.

If a slave is catching up, it could have GIGABYTES of binary log data from the master. It would then write this to disk. These reads would then NOT come from cache.

Simply using a small buffer could solve this problem.

One HACK would be to use a ram drive or tmpfs for logs. I assume that the log thread will block if the disk fills up… if it does so …

As I’ve written in my previous post “1/3 Implementing an AutoSuggest feature using MySQL fulltext indices”, it’s possible to use the MySQL/MyISAM full-text index to extract search words for an AutoSuggest feature with great performance (because the index tree is used actually). This tool, called myisam_suggest, is my first implementation of this. Download Here: myisam_suggest.c [...]