It is no secret that Spil Games is a heavy user of Sphinx Search. We use it in many ways including game-search, profile-search and since a few months ago to even build our category and subcategory listings. In all cases we do not use it as an extension of MySQL but rather as a standalone […]

The post How we tamed Sphinx Search appeared first on Spil Games Engineering.

What programming languages and platforms do you use for large-scale projects in your organization?

If something is missing from the list please leave a comment and share your story. Thanks!

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The post Poll: What programming languages and platforms do you use? appeared first on MySQL Performance Blog.

This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitis.com blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitis.com care.

Full table scan vs full index scan performance

Author: Stephane Combaudon.

Using full index scans are not always faster than a full table scan. Stephane explores the situations in which a sequential read through of a full table performs better than using randomly-read full index.

Big Data …

In prior years a daily update from Open World was possible, but this year my schedule was too full to support it. This is my compendium of thoughts about MySQL Connect, JavaOne, and Open World 2012.

MySQL Connect was great – good sessions re-enforcing the positive investments Oracle is making in the product. I’ll leave to others to qualify changes in what elements of technology are opened or closed along the road to a better MySQL. The announcement of Connector/Python 1.0 GA on Saturday was great news and as a community we owe a lot to Greet Vanderkelen.

NoSQL is a hot topic along with using JSON objects and it was interesting hearing of some unequal testing paradigms to position non-Oracle solutions to be “better” …

We’ve seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today’s technology world — where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount — exist in open application programming interfaces, or APIs.

Open source software continues to be a critical part of software development, systems administration, IT operations and more, but much of the action in leveraging modern cloud computing and services-based infrastructures centers on APIs. Open APIs are the new open source.

Read the full story at LinuxInsider.

I tried Python out a while ago, but stopped trying it to learn it after some major frustrations. Maybe I didn’t dig deep enough into it. I found the documentation hard to read, and the module layout seemed a little random at times. For some reason I found executing an external process and getting the results to be a little convoluted. (Since then I’ve learned to use popen(..).communicate())

I ended up messing with other languages to try to find one that suits my tastes, like Erlang and D. I read through 7 …

I'm the boards of two companies (Pentaho, Revolution Analytics) that are starting to see a lot of customer traction around Big Data. More and more companies in media, pharma, retail and finance are doing advanced analysis, reporting, graphing, etc with massive data sets. It made me wonder what other areas of the technology stack might evolve with the trend towards Big Data.  Obviously, there's new middleware layers like Hadoop and Map Reduce, and we're also seeing the emergence of NoSQL data management layers with Cassandra, MongoDB, MemBase and others.  But what …

I hate losing useful SQL queries, so I tend to save them. Ever so often, I stumble across a file of queries from some work I was doing months ago. The following two queries are just such a case. I was analyzing some call data for a call center that uses Asterisk. I set up a temporary database for this, so I can't even run them again. Still, it's nice to save them away for a rainy day.

Call Center Call Volume by Day of Week and Hour

SET @tz = 'EST5EDT';
select 
  DAYNAME(CONVERT_TZ(start, 'GMT', @tz)) AS "Weekday",
  HOUR(CONVERT_TZ(start, 'GMT', @tz)) AS "Hour",
  COUNT(id), 
  SUM(duration), 
  SUM(billsec), 
  AVG(duration), AVG(billsec) 
  FROM cdr 
    WHERE dcontext IN ('Queue1', 'Queue2', 'Queue3', 'Queue4')
      AND duration > 60
    GROUP BY Weekday, Hour
    ORDER BY WEEKDAY(CONVERT_TZ(start, 'GMT', @tz)), Hour 
;

I was trying to figure out …

The fine folks at O'Reilly sent me reviewer copy of two books on Erlang

• 
  
• Erlang Programming: A Concurrent Approach to Software Development by Francesco Cesarini and Simon Thompson
  
• Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong.
  

I am currently in the process of learning Erlang for a personal project. These books both measures up to the high expectations I have come to expect from Pragmatic Programmers Publishing and from O'Reilly Books.

Erlang is a difficult language to "sell", and is a challenge to learn.

Both books assume you have decently good programming skills, and don't need your hand held too much …

Having written about what I think is cool about the upcoming MySQL Conference and the MySQL Camp, now I want to finish up with what I’d like to see at the Percona Performance Conference. Just to recap, this is a conference we created to serve those who want to learn about performance — not “learn about MySQL,” not “learn about database performance,” just learn about performance, period.

I want to see everything. I think this is going to be the single best conference I’ve ever been to. Even the way the conference is organized is exciting. For example, it’s running from early morning till late at night, nonstop. The sessions are also (mostly) only 25 minutes. This means if you decide a session isn’t all that interesting, you didn’t spend much time on it, and you don’t have long to wait for the next one.

So here is a small sample of the …