Xaprb

Sphinx is an amazing piece of software. Andrew Aksyonoff is an amazing guy, too. But aside from Andrew’s many talents, and Sphinx’s awesomeness, I wanted to list two related examples of how Sphinx makes the world a better place. Both examples are implemented as open-source software from Ivinco, a company founded by a group of people I used to work with.

The first is the Sphinx WordPress search plugin. I have repeatedly considered using it on my own blog, but I’m running on Pair’s shared hosting, so I don’t think I should do that. But we use it on the MySQL Performance Blog. It returns highly relevant and very fast search results, and has a number of other benefits that end up being very good for SEO, among other things.

The second is the Dokuwiki search plugin. I love Dokuwiki, but its built-in search is horrible; the results are anything but relevant. The Sphinx search plugin is excellent. So if you hate Dokuwiki’s search results, try this plugin and see what you think.

Both the WordPress plugin and the Dokuwiki plugin are available from Ivinco’s open-source software page.

I’ve started an HTML manual for innotop, a “top” clone for MySQL. It includes screenshots. Right now I only have screenshots for the new U mode, which demonstrates how the User Statistics enhancements in Percona Server can show you which tables and indexes are most used.

This month’s Maatkit release, which just hit the download servers, contains a new feature for mk-query-digest: Apdex scores. The Apdex performance index is a sensible metric of how satisfactory the response time to a request is. Of all the scientific metrics I’ve seen, it’s the most practical; and of all the practical ones I’ve seen, it’s the most scientific.

To use this feature, you need to know what the Apdex threshold means, and you need to know how to configure this in mk-query-digest.

And then you can ask and answer practical questions such as “which classes of queries against this MySQL server are not satisfying users?” Or, because mk-query-digest supports the HTTP protocol, you can pose the same question about your web application overall.