beer planet

The Problem

I've had MySQL on my Windows 7 laptop for a bit (as part of wampserver), mostly for local offline Wordpress development.

However, even though MySQL is relatively stable, I've been observing a vast quantity of intermittent MySQL errors, as reported by Wordpress in the PHP error log (C:\wamp\logs\php_error.log). Here are some examples:

[05-Jan-2010 09:47:51] WordPress database error Error on delete of

…

Updated: September 28th, 2009

In the past few weeks I've been implementing advanced search at Plaxo, working quite closely with Solr enterprise search server. Today, I saw this relatively detailed comparison between Solr and its main competitor Sphinx (full credit goes to StackOverflow user mausch who had been using Solr for the past 2 years). For those still…

Updated: January 18th, 2010

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can…

Updated: June 9th, 2009

Introduction

If you, like me, are building or thinking of implementing a MySQL-powered application that has any need for prioritizing selecting certain data over other data, this article is for you.

Example

As a real world example, consider a queue-like video processing system. Your application receives new videos and processes them. The volume of incoming videos can at times be higher than the processing rate because the process is CPU…

Updated: June 9th, 2009

Today I had to swap 2 columns in one of my MySQL tables. The task, which seems easily accomplishable by a temp variable, proved to be a bit harder to complete. But only just a bit.

Here are my findings:

1. The

   UPDATE swap_test SET x=y, y=x;

   approach doesn't work, as it'll just set both values to y.

   PostgreSQL seems to handle this query differently, as it apparently

…