I presented a webinar this week to give an overview of several Full Text Search solutions and compare their performance.  Even if you missed the webinar, you can register for it, and you’ll be emailed a link to the recording.

During my webinar, a number of attendees asked some good questions.  Here are their questions and my answers.

Adrian B. commented:

Q: Would’ve been a good idea to retrieve the same number of rows on each benchmark (I noticed 100 rows on SQL and 20 on Sphinx). Also Sphinx does the relevance sorting by default, adding relevance sorting to the MySQL queries would make them even slower, I’m sure.

Indeed, the result set of 20 rows from SphinxQL queries is …

Call for papers is still open for Percona Live London 2012, but only for few more days. We’re looking for great talks relevant for MySQL Ecosystem it could be about MySQL and its variants as well as technologies which are used together with MySQL. Please consider submitting if you’re actively using MySQL, Percona Server, MariaDB or Drizzle in production – the practical war stories are always very interesting. If you’re practicing MySQL consultant or other service vendor we would like to hear about your experience with multiple environments which gives unique prospective. If you’re working with MySQL or its variants on code Level and can share some prospective about internals or explain how features work in depth it would be a gem.

Do not feel intimidated. Many of the most attended …

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  …

Ensuring that everyone has a chance to attend Percona’s training for MySQL, we are announcing the following dates for Europe. You can always find the current schedule at Percona Training.

The dates for Europe are: Live Virtual Training: Developer Training for MySQL

• Begins Monday, August 27, 2012 , 9am – 11am, Greenwich Mean Time

Madrid, España

• Begins Monday, September 3, 2012
• The class will be conducted in Spanish.

Paris, France

…

I’m hosting MySQL Indexes: Best Practices Webinar next week, Wednesday August 15. In which I will talk about how MySQL indexes are structured and how they can be used, as well as go over the best practices in selecting correct indexes for your database workloads.

Indexing looks like a very basic topic, but it is rather deep one. Most people would think they know how to index their database properly but this just applies to basics, and more often than not a lot of opportunities for optimizations are left on the table. You can often get 3x better performance by having your database well indexed, compared to “basically” indexed.

In addition to talking about indexes themselves I will also talk about some query tricks you can use to get MySQL to use indexes when it could not before. This is another tool every MySQL DBA should …

Today, Percona announces that Live Virtual Training is now an option for busy professionals.

We set out to develop a training solution that balances the time to deliver the content with the amount of time an attendee can participate in a live virtual training (LVT) session. The goal was to ensure there was still time in the day to allow the attendee to complete his or her work. Percona’s LVT offering extends the days of delivery while reducing the time the attendee needs to be in class each day. Our LVT sessions are a combination of live virtual sessions and remote labs,  blended with online learning. How does this work?

We ask that attendees set aside 2-hours each day for 5-days for the live virtual sessions. This is the time when the Percona instructor delivers the lecture, shows examples, and answers questions. After the live session is over, attendees have a remote lab that will take, on average, 30-minutes to complete. …

If you’re looking for best prices for Percona Live NY 2012, taking place Oct 1,2 in New York do not delay and book now. Super Saver discounts ends tomorrow, which can save you hundreds of dollars off conference prices list prices. These are the best prices you can get by booking early – There will be no other discounts available that will get you to this price.

Percona Live NY 2012 builds on success on our 2011 NY event Which attracted over 300 attendees in May 2011. We have expanded the event to 2 days, adding Tutorial Day with many in depth and hands on training sessions for most popular MySQL topics. We also have moved to the new, …

Yes, We will be at OSCON next week. I will be talking about Optimizing MySQL Configuration and host a BOF on MySQL Sharding Replication and Clustering if you’re interested in any of these technologies please come by and share your story. I would love to see both users and technology vendors working in this field.

Jay Janssen is going to talk about Writing non-blocking code for interaction with data systems and web services in Node.js and Perl and about Running a high performance LAMP stack on a $20 Virtual server.

Looking for a great opportunity to share your MySQL knowledge with the MySQL community? Here is your chance.

Percona is happy to announce that the dates of the Percona Live MySQL London Conference have been set for Dec. 3-4, 2012. Call for speakers is underway and will be open until August 17th, 2012. The conference committee will review proposals that fit into the likely conference tracks of:

• Developing Applications
• Database Administration
• Trends in Architecture and Design
• Tools
• Utilizing Hardware
• New Features
• Best Practices for Businesses
• Replication
• High Availability Strategies

Each session is 50 minutes in length, including a Q&A period.

The conference will also include tutorial sessions. Tutorials should present immediate and practical applications of in-depth MySQL knowledge targeted at a …

Upgrading MySQL is boring topic, upgrading MySQL is something we would rather to be done with and get benefits from new cool features or be done with bugs and limitations which haunted us for years. Yet if you’re not careful performing MySQL upgrade you can get advantage of multiple opportunities of downtime and data loss, which come as just some of the risks. There is also one special thing about upgrades – unlike many other tasks DBA has to do, major version upgrade is done only once, at least once for every environment and every major version upgrade has its own issues. At Percona we’ve dealt with many MySQL Upgrades, in some cases we’re asked to Perform upgrade completely, in others to assist/advice on doing upgrade, finally we can be called to resolved failed upgrades which, can be all kinds of issues when upgrade is not done carefully.

On June 27, I’ll talk about some of best practices Percona had developed over years in …